Information theory is so cool. I feel like having a solid grasp of the fundamentals is critical for achieving mastery in software development. Closely related

Information theory is so cool. I feel like having a solid grasp of the fundamentals is critical for achieving mastery in software development. Closely related would be digital signal processing and frequency domain techniques, both also extremely useful in many branches of software. The actual information content of a thing has always surprised me, especially when factoring in slightly imperfect (but passable) representations such as JPEG or MP3. To lose some information seems entirely acceptable in many cases.