What To Learn In My Next Years of Programming?

I recently looked back on my first five years of programming. Looking forward to the next five years of programming, these are some of the things I want to accomplish:

• Convince someone to pay me to program. Really want to make my own money for once.
• Get a Master’s Degree. I hope to get a better theoretical foundation through a master’s degree.
• Speak at conferences. I want to experience the spotlight for once
• Develop my communication skills. If you speak to me and read the rest of my blog, you’ll realize that I don’t come across well. I hope I can fix that.
• Understand how the programming languages I use work. Rather than just being something I use, I want to grow a real appreciation of programming languages and their features. I also want to understand the respective tooling associated with each programming language I come across.
• Get a true five years of experience. I mentioned in the post about my first five years that they felt like me just repeating the same year of programming experience five times. I’m hoping that in the next five years I can continually challenge myself.
• Face my fears. Going along the previous point, the reason I struggled to gain reasonable experience is because I was started that learning something would be too hard. I hope to actually learn all the things I’ve been scared to learn like databases and microcontrollers.
• Develop a good workflow. Right now I’m doing everything haphazardly. In these next five years, I’m going to grow a systematic problem solving approach. This coupled with having an efficient programming setup and tooling.
• Understand the power of the cloud. Vloud computing is all the buzz these days and I want to take the time to understand what all the different cloud services do. I also want to understand how old school software deployment. Think FTP, VPSs and what not.
• Gain the wisdom to understand when and when not to roll your own. I don’t just mean this in the areas of cryptography and sensitive programming requirements. I mean this in the area of understanding of when a prexisting solution would work fine. For instance instead of creating a new blog over and over again, WordPress or Ghost will work just fine.
• Make some cool stuff. So far I haven’t really made anything that makes someone go wow. I hope to do that in the next five years.
• Learn about design. Dont really know how to make pretty things so I’m hoping to learn how to do that as well.

So that’s what I’m hoping to do in the next five years as I continue to develop my programming skills.