This might sound old fashioned, but if you have a whole year I would invest some time in really learning the fundamentals. Even if no sane person would impleme

This might sound old fashioned, but if you have a whole year I would invest some time in really learning the fundamentals. Even if no sane person would implement a linked list in C during work, its still important to know how it works. As well as having a basic understanding how a computer works, how assembly roughly looks like and how this correlates to the abstract machine model of C (pointers mostly). Then get some understanding of object oriented programming in typed languages (e.g. Java, C#). Check out the "gang of 4" design patterns, imo they make a lot of sense (in the rare case you need it). Although in my controversial opinion it is used way to often. You can go further and think about how this actually works. Like Java classes are actually pointers to heap allocated objects. They python runtime is implemented in C too as far as i know. You can check out the difference to dynamic languages like python and javascript and think about upsides and downsides. Try to improve your coding style so it can be easily read by others. E.g. structure your datatypes in a senseful way and use many small functions. Uncle Bobs clean code book can be good for that (although probably controversial). You could try to make a small project for everything you learn, and in the end select something you like and make a bigger project.