Some of it this was spot on, especially doing research. Very rarely you will be doing something completely novel and it always good to look at how other people

Some of it this was spot on, especially doing research. Very rarely you will be doing something completely novel and it always good to look at how other people have solved a problem. However the old "Learn C" and "Write a compiler" which are within meme territory tbh. It is more important generally to understand what a particular in whatever language you are using to know what the compiler / interpreter / run-time is doing under the hood as most developers will be working with a high level language. I've seen a lot of "how to improve as a programmer" articles and IMO what seems to be left out is learning how to do things as simply as possible. Many of the software systems I've worked on is so over-engineered, many simple websites are huge both client and server side and they usually don't warrant it.