A little late to the party here, but here's my list:
- Leetcode, my DS & A courses in college weren't particularly rigorous. Only by doing 300 LC problems to prep for interviews did I begin to feel competent with DS & A, and I still have a lot more niche stuff to learn like Red Black trees and KD trees.
- Pay attention in college classes! Certain classes I took in college are core parts of my computer mental model that I think about every day. Especially operating systems, hardware + systems fundamentals, programming languages, and obviously DS & A.
- Generally most of the work that is done these days is in web dev, so be sure to do a bunch of web dev personal projects, ideally substantial apps. If going into another area then be sure to get good at that, like do some RPi stuff if you're trying to get into embedded.
But above all else, the number one thing that made getting good at programming easier was being genuinely interested in the subject matter. My classes and projects never really felt like work to me. If you hate computers then you're gonna have a bad time.
- Leetcode, my DS & A courses in college weren't particularly rigorous. Only by doing 300 LC problems to prep for interviews did I begin to feel competent with DS & A, and I still have a lot more niche stuff to learn like Red Black trees and KD trees.
- Pay attention in college classes! Certain classes I took in college are core parts of my computer mental model that I think about every day. Especially operating systems, hardware + systems fundamentals, programming languages, and obviously DS & A.
- Generally most of the work that is done these days is in web dev, so be sure to do a bunch of web dev personal projects, ideally substantial apps. If going into another area then be sure to get good at that, like do some RPi stuff if you're trying to get into embedded.
But above all else, the number one thing that made getting good at programming easier was being genuinely interested in the subject matter. My classes and projects never really felt like work to me. If you hate computers then you're gonna have a bad time.