Item — HN Reader

Congrats on the launch and sorry if my question is not directly related to your announcement.

I’ve known you as creator of Apache Storm and author of the manning Big Data book, and was impressed by what you achieved, so impressed that I was wondering for the past years what was the stealth startup Nathan Marz is working on, and whether it will introduce a new paradigm the way Storm was a paradigm shift towards streaming.

What is your advice to someone who just started his career (~2 years xp) and not sure how to invest his time, to be able to reach your level of mastery in the next few years? Should one focus on the basics, algorithms and data structures? Or should one try to be very proficient in one programming language? Or try to learn a bunch of technologies/frameworks/databases etc and become most productive with them?

Thank you.

The first thing to keep in mind is that it takes a long time – thousands upon thousands of hours. I think the best way to utilize those hours is to spend them building real applications, and to always be pushing your comfort zone in some way. That could be by utilizing a new piece of infrastructure, working in a new language, or working on a new problem space that's very challenging to you. Make sure to seek jobs that enable you to consistently push your comfort zone like that! If you keep doing that, after many years you'll become a very strong programmer.