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Ha! Welcome to the club of newcomers, mate :)
Personally, I don't work on programming (it's more of a hobby that I take seriously), so I am not the person to answer correctly. Besides that...
In ANY STEM field, unless you have a monstrous amount of talent (more like the realm of fantasy) you will be stumped. What do you do?
1. Realise that in such fields, you NEVER EVER stop learning.
2. Realise you are just at the beginning.
3. Such experiences are tremendously important and good for you. Why? Because overconfidence and wrong self-estimation is like kicking a barrel of nitroglycerine furiously, claiming that "I've got this, I have fired off a couple of firecrackers before!"
I'd say more, but the comment space is a tad short :( -
Now you mention it, I remember an old colleague (experienced dev) telling me one of the hardest times in his career, emotionally speaking, was after he started getting his first few “runs” of high productivity on quite difficult challenges. The inevitable TNT you speak of was kicked and he took it pretty hard. But he stuck in there, and found the pattern repeated itself, only this time he at least saw the TNT first before he kicked it. And over time he just gradually lost interest in kicking TNT.
I think one of the hardest experiences as a junior is the oscillation from perceived competency to perceived incompetency.
I just spent the last 4 weeks putting together my first major UI set of components for a financial calculator. Uses Vue, Quasar, a lot of data transformation and reactive UI programming. I felt quite chuffed. Its pending merge.
Then my lead asked me to help him debug something on the flagship and legacy project; for educational purposes, not that he actually needs my help. The application is 100x the size of the one I have been working on, and monolithic. Orders of magnitude more complex.
The jump from a sense of “I might be able to do this” to “I could never do that” was almost soul destroying. Like looking back over the last ten meters you ran, realising that running is hard and you did it. Only to look ahead and realise there are easily 100 miles ahead of you.
How the fuck do you cope with that.
rant