There are 2 things i feel correlate strongly with the best devs i know: 1. Quantity leads to Quality. This has been written about by a number of people and for

There are 2 things i feel correlate strongly with the best devs i know: 1. Quantity leads to Quality. This has been written about by a number of people and for good reason. As with any craft, quality is born from doing something in repetition and learning from your mistakes. There is a brilliant anecdote on this from a ceramics class of all things ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality... ). So try lots of things, even if they seem silly. You'd be amazed what a throwaway project in a language you will never again use can teach you professionally. 2. Be passionate about both Coding and Learning. I start to look for a new job when 2 conditions are met. First is that i have been around long enough to see the consequences of my stack/coding/architectural decisions. Second is that i am no longer having "eureka" learning moments with regularity. For me, this inflection point tends to be around 3 years with a company. It will vary for others depending on role and willingness to branch out in your codebase. tl;dr: Force yourself to learn regularly. Move on when you start to stagnate. Find excuses to code things, even if they are junk. Above all: have fun.