I was on a remote system and remember I couldn't exit vi. What did I do? Well, I opened a second ssh session, looked up the process id with ps and killed it. This is so many decades ago ... like the very beginning of my curiosity when it comes to IT basically. Thinking back to it, I wonder how I was able to use ssh and tools like grep, ps and kill but did not know how to operate basic vi ...
This has become a recurring thing for me to the point where I sometimes feel like I'm not as intelligent as I used to be. I'll need to look at requirements around older existing code, so I use git blame to see the commit history. It occasionally leads to me to some older code that I had written, and sometimes I marvel at how I was able to figure out or troubleshoot the issue.
One of the earliest examples in my professional career is using Threads. I had an academic understanding of threads. My practical knowledge around them was dubious at best. With the help of Stack Overflow and lots of web searching, I cobbled together a thread manager that can spawn separate threads for asynchronous web requests and kill a web request after X amount of time. I even made sure that error handling redirected gracefully should one of those threads get killed. That code (with no changes to the core functionality) still exists to this day.