Good on you for asking this. I have a few perhaps less conventional Big Lever answers for you: Read every damn day. Read in your field proactively - stuff you

Good on you for asking this. I have a few perhaps less conventional Big Lever answers for you: Read every damn day. Read in your field proactively - stuff you don't need to know yet. Read stuff tangentially related to your field. Read the stuff most people in your field don't know (sales! business! negotiation! psychology!) This has been the bedrock of my entire career. I now make a comfortable upper middle class salary working 20-24h a week as a consultant, allowing me to do grad school in areas of personal interest, and I didn't even do comp sci in uni, or start programming professionally until I was 30. But I probably read 1-2 hours a day and have read a lot over the last three decades. It has paid off massively. Learning to write is important too, but recently there has been a trend in telling everyone they need to write daily. If you write more than you read, you're doing it wrong and are probably a shit writer wasting your time. (Real Writers who have done an extended period of MASSIVE reading excluded..) Learn soft skills: writing, communicating, negotiating, reading a room. I did this by doing door to door canvassing in my 20's for an environmental group, haha. Trial by fire. Once you've spent some time hitting rich folks in West Vancouver for money to save trees, you aren't afraid of any meeting. (No German Shepherd ready to roam out onto the road and scare me off? I got this.) Have a hobby that you can build a life-long practice habit around. I recommend this be something that you don't plan to pivot your career to so you don't ever take your eyes off long term development for short term gain. Music is a popular one, but there are lots of other options. The point of it is to get good and consistent at highly focused solitary skill development. Warren Buffet famously credited playing an instrument as his biggest advantage. I've taught a bunch of juniors to code now, and the ones who already had this skill basically had rockets on their feet. One of my friends who has been a silicon valley exec many times over said "I always hire the musicians". Lots of other things are important, but for me, those are the big three. Start doing those now and you'll have a very attractive career in your 30's and 40's.