Stick around on a codebase that's used by real people. Most of the lessons about programming I learned by designing and coding sets of features, shipping them,

Stick around on a codebase that's used by real people. Most of the lessons about programming I learned by designing and coding sets of features, shipping them, and then being the one handling all the bug reports and feature requests. Performance tuning, defensive coding, debugging technique, ui design, codebase architecture, developer team coordination, ... the list of things to be learned by sticking around for the long haul is endless and hard to replace with book smarts.