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Reflection: From Years of Debugging Pain to Compounding Mastery

I used to get stuck for months, even a full year, trying to resolve seemingly simple bugs. Back then, I had no GPT-4, no clear framework, and little experience with service-layer debugging.

Now, in just a few days — with 5 years of self-taught coding behind me and GPT-4 Plus in my corner — I finally broke through one of the nastiest service errors in Odoo for Windows.

This experience proves to me that:

• Debugging is not linear, it's exponential.
• GPT is not just an assistant — it's a compounding accelerator for those who already invested in growth.
• The deeper your pain in the early years, the higher your efficiency later — if you persist.

📈 The Compounding Effect in Debugging

Just like in finance, where small consistent investments grow into large returns over time, your early debugging failures are not wasted. Every pain, every crash, every failed attempt becomes a unit of resilience and intuition. You don't just "learn to fix bugs" — you build internal heuristics, pattern recognition, and mental scripts that compound invisibly.

The first year might feel like walking in fog. The fifth year? It's like you've developed radar.

This was not just about solving a bug. It was about:

• Rewiring how I approach failure
• Reconnecting with the version of myself that once almost gave up
• Redeeming the months and years that once felt "wasted"

I'm proud of this win. Not because it's technical — but because it means I no longer run away from the abyss. I solve it.

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🔍 Real-World Proof of Mastery: Two Battle-Tested Debugging Cases

🧱 1. Odoo 18.0 Fails to Start Windows Service and Ignores odoo.conf

View full case

This issue taught me how deep Windows services caching can be — where odoo.conf was completely ignored unless forced through CLI. The system kept defaulting to a ghost config (openpg) that wasn’t even defined. Solving this took rethinking how Odoo was booted, overriding service assumptions, and finally launching via Python CLI with the real config.

🔐 2. Odoo 18.0 Fails to Create Database: "permission denied to create database"

View full case

This second issue was a PostgreSQL privilege trap: despite using the correct credentials, the user lacked CREATEDB permission. Identifying the missing role privilege, altering the role in pgAdmin, and reflecting it properly in odoo.conf proved once again that what feels like an Odoo bug can sometimes be a system-level access violation.

Together, these experiences demonstrate that mastery doesn't come from being a genius — but from being someone who refuses to give up.

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If you're reading this and feel stuck: you're not broken, you're compounding. Stay with the problem. The tipping point will come.

Let Astralis light the unknown.

— Reltroner Studio