Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

Use strongly typed languages for large projects

Most companies seem to prefer folks who have a broad base of general computing knowledge plus one specific area of expertise. This is sometimes called a "T-shaped programmer". There are definitely exceptions, but is a good place to start.

Other than that, practice, practice, practice. And get out of your comfort zone when you practice, don't just do things that are easy for you. You are only learning when it is hard and it makes you wonder if you might be stupid.

- Keep it simple, stupid. Advanced is not a compliment.

- Languages and frameworks don't matter. There's a closed set of concepts they're all reusing. Especially if it's hot shit: that means someone mined ideas from 30 years ago.

- Most problems tend to fall not to cleverness, but to compute power and the right glue. See previous two points.

- Everything is a tradeoff, everything is a moving target. Programming is about the battles you choose.

I'm more or less on the same boat. My advise is, don't let it overwhelm you, learn as the need arises (or you have a burning interest in something). At work I've done a handful of languages (web development can do that quite quickly these days) and I've not been here a year. On my own time I experiment with D and Rust, and maybe soon Kotlin. Those are my languages of interest, I don't do something every single day for hours on end, but now and then I open up an editor and play around with one of those till I find something to build on my spare time. Chances are as you get new jobs you'll learn new languages and stacks, so don't be overwhelmed. How many co workers do you see doing 50 projects in 50 different languages and stacks all at once? ;)

More respect for testing on larger teams. Code regressions cost teams I've worked on 1000's of hours of debugging.