I spent too much of my studying effort on being a programmer. Mastering C++11 features, writing SIMD assembly, reading Agner Fog manuals to learn the x64 ABI an

I spent too much of my studying effort on being a programmer. Mastering C++11 features, writing SIMD assembly, reading Agner Fog manuals to learn the x64 ABI and instruction timings. Implementation stuff. Those things are important, but I focused on them too much. I should have spent some of that time on higher level math-y skills like machine learning, numerical optimization, vision, NP hard approximation algorithms, computational geometry, control theory, etc.