I got some great advice early on in my career: "Spend just 15 minutes per day reading about your industry and within five years you will be in the top 1%" I m

I got some great advice early on in my career: "Spend just 15 minutes per day reading about your industry and within five years you will be in the top 1%" I may not be in the top 1% but reading about programming has helped me come up with solutions that senior developers were not aware about. It has made me more interested in programming and had lead to more and higher paying opportunities. I never programmed as a teenager. I took my first computer class in grade 11 and always felt out of place since practically everyone in the class had been programming for a number of years already. I got mediocre marks in university and even considered dropping out of Comp Sci because studying it didn't interest me. I also quit my first job after a year and took time off because I didn't know if I wanted to do programming. That's when I found I missed it. It is relatively easy to find stories of naturally gifted athletes who amount to nothing. They end up going nowhere because they just rely on their natural "talent" and after a while, people who put in effort start to surpass them. The same is true of programming. Reading 15 minutes per day I finish 1-3 books per month. The average programmer probably doesn't read 1-3 books per year. I should clarify that I mean read books (I have a subscription to Safari Books Online). Reading HN or Techcrunch for 15 minutes per day will probably not improve your programming ability. Of course, perhaps this is not relevant for you and you are just in the wrong job but you do state that you want to be a good programmer. It sounds like you are. Programming is more than just writing code. It also has a lot to do with communication and understanding others which it sounds like you are skilled at.