Build things. Build BIG things! Most programmers never have to build anything big or complicated. After you've done it a few times, and having to refactor pa

Build things. Build BIG things! Most programmers never have to build anything big or complicated. After you've done it a few times, and having to refactor parts of your code because you designed it poorly, then you start figuring out how to avoid those mistakes in the future. That is the definition of "getting better". You will also learn things that you didn't know you didn't know. For example, I'm working on a programming language as a library that is publicly available as an open source project. On Monday, I realized that I needed to figure out a better (stable) way to compile it as a shared library and then write an install script to install it globally so that other projects could compile/execute against it on their system. It took ~5 hours to figure out and document, but I learned A LOT about how shared libraries work in Linux (and the fact that the loader vs. the compiler linker search for libraries differently, etc.). Most importantly, I enjoyed it!