I've been there. The problem with being a good programmer is that you quickly exhaust the low hanging fruit of interesting things to work on in your career. Rem

I've been there. The problem with being a good programmer is that you quickly exhaust the low hanging fruit of interesting things to work on in your career. Remember that time when you knew next to nothing and everything you did was interesting, because it was novel. Those days are over, because you are now pretty good at doing what 95% of organizations need out of Software Engineers. Don't panic. Work is going to be a little bit boring for you for a while; learn how to cope with this for a bit. It is going to take longer for you to become an expert at something interesting and important than it took for you to get to where you are now. This may seem counterintuitive as you are quite a bit more aware of what you don't know than you than you were before you typed your first "hello world". That's okay. This is how knowledge works. All those abstractions you've built up in your brain for the the low-level things you didn't need to know at first are massive wells of knowledge that you only see the surface of. So How do you get good at something? I truly believe you can only get good at something that you can sustain working on for a few years. I find, personally, that I can read one theory book or set of papers between bouts of working on something. That seems to be a good mix for me. This isn't a race, this takes time. Once you start down the path of becoming an expert at something you'll realize it is the work of an entire lifetime. Enjoy the ride.