Read "Functional Programming in Scala" or any other good book on functional programming to see things differently if you've just stuck with imperative so far. T

Read "Functional Programming in Scala" or any other good book on functional programming to see things differently if you've just stuck with imperative so far. There's also http://iloveponies.github.io/120-hour-epic-sax-marathon/ http://iloveponies.github.io/120-hour-epic-sax-marathon/ Read books on concurrency ("Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala" if you carry on with scala) and then you'll find different ways to write performant concurrent code - for CRUD sites or other stuff. I'm not pushing scala rather exposure to other ways of doing things you might not have come across - functional programming, futures, akka, etc. But yeah, also design patterns. And have you read http://highscalability.com/ http://highscalability.com/ for architecture ideas?