Other way of doing it more, is not just doing the same/similar thing again and again, but writing/reading large amount of very different programs. One day you d

Other way of doing it more, is not just doing the same/similar thing again and again, but writing/reading large amount of very different programs. One day you do web app, other day you write a kernel driver, third day you write a scraping app, fourth day you write a tunel driver to get networking over USB, fifth day you reverse engineer some random piece of HW you have laying around and write alternative firmware for it to teach it new things, and so on. (it may not be days :)) Each of these things will branch out into different areas. You may need to write a text parser. You may need to design a USB protocol to relay packets. You may need to learn a processor architecture, calling convention, assembler mnemonics. Over time you'll gain a lot of knowledge and you may be able to cross-apply plenty of it accross the domain boundaries.