Graduate classes. Honestly - I'd been a professional programmer for years when I went back to grad school in CS, and I really didn't expect it to make a differ

Graduate classes. Honestly - I'd been a professional programmer for years when I went back to grad school in CS, and I really didn't expect it to make a difference in my programming, but it did. Thinking at a deeper level about the logical structures I was manipulating made me a better programmer. I think you'd get the same benefit from doing a lot of reading and coding of examples from e.g. algorithms textbooks and so forth - the key (I think) isn't even so much what subject, just that you're thinking hard about each line you right instead of just emitting it at speed for a deadline. Sort of a meditation or kata.