Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk.
Unlunckily the great amount of resources brought us to forget the art of good programming. I know I might sound old fashioned, but I can remember more than a hell of a program running on a C64, on which only 38k were actually available, the remaining 26 being occupied by the operating system itself. Nowadays too many resources are wasted, nothing is optimized and a lot of programs are lousy. A word of caution: optimization should not be the first thing you look at, as you should first try to have an understandable and maintenable codebase, and you should really measure and optimize only when it's needed, but there's a limit for everything... Anyway, back to the subject of university, one of the exams I've seated (computer and network architecture) represents a good example of something I've really never used in a direct way but dramatically changed the way I look at software, as now I know how the underlying hardware works, and I know many programmers for which this statement doesn't hold true: e.g. you can see it from the way they write inner loops: if you know how words are stored in memory and in cache you'll chose the order which best fits the underlying physical system.
Get involved in a language standardization effort
mrghmr....
Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.
Now this is more like it!
With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning.
Book learning is not enough. You must try, and try, and try. Well, better yet... Try not. Do, or do not, there is no try. And this comes from the wisdom of Master Yoda, so it should not be questioned :-) Nevertheless, IMHO books play a very important part, because they can start you up and serve as a reference, but there must be a "deliberate effort to improve", so you must bang your head on that wall: that's where my look comes from, it has nothing to do with my 15 years of rugby. And it is fundamental to share your experience with others: you have something to learn from them, they have something to learn from you.
About the three-part plan proposed by Fred Brooks: see the "Work on projects with other programmeres" part. When you work in a small firm with a small IT department it is very unlikely that there exist the conditions to follow the plan, at least inside the firm itself.
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