- If you're in it just for the money, bounce now. - Be curious. - Push your comfort-zone, often. Do hard things: write a C compiler, design a pipelined/microc

- If you're in it just for the money, bounce now. - Be curious. - Push your comfort-zone, often. Do hard things: write a C compiler, design a pipelined/microcoded/branch-predicting MICMAC processor, write a kernel module, write a 3D graphics engine, and so on. - Master the fundamental concepts, data structures and algorithms. - Dig deep: computer architecture/organization, assembly, Linux from Scratch, source code of OSes/tools, etc. And, there's more out there than just FOSS; some very useful tools aren't new, OSS or popular. Get proficient at debugging tools. - Don't get stuck, emotional or religious about any one domain. - Master one or two domains. - Be ambivalent, healthily suspicious of and open to "new" flavors of tech fashions. - Practicing and reading books is all well-and-good, but trying to make something is the best teacher. - Throwing away and rewriting a few times helps. - Write for clarity, not cleverness. - Work on something that matters. - Avoid job security where you can by documenting and writing obvious code, because it will hold you back more than help. - Don't write useless, giant comments. - Don't write heaps of uncommented code. - Literate programming can be awesome for tricky/complicated desired code behavior. - Don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to. - Premature optimization is a faux pas. - Small changes. - The only good code is small pieces of low complexity, tested code; fragile, big function, "black boxes" are evil. - Use mostly standard conventions. - Have fun, break things and put them back together again :)