0. Working with very talented people exposed me to a lot of ideas and concepts I probably wouldn’t have found. I’m self taught, most of my prior learning was un

0. Working with very talented people exposed me to a lot of ideas and concepts I probably wouldn’t have found. I’m self taught, most of my prior learning was unstructured trial and error. 1. Worked on distributed systems with externally imposed fault tolerance considerations. Designing around these constraints was painful, but forced me to learn how to learn the relevant technical terms and prior art. 2. Functional programming (in Clojure) taught me how to really think about data flow, and design around it. Limiting and isolating state is fundamental to how I work now even in imperative languages. 3. Static types (in TypeScript, which wasn’t my choice but which I love now) taught me how to really think about modeling data upfront, in ways I find more challenging in dynamic languages. 4. Working on several projects either focused on performance or with significant perf challenges has taught (and continues to teach) me how to anticipate where to focus either in initial design or how to approach performance-sensitive refactors. Edit to add: 5. Reading a lot of code has helped immensely. Often when I find a project I’m interested in, I’ll read its source code in my free time. I’ve learned so much and been quite inspired, even reading through projects I’d never take on myself.