I always joke that the best thing I learned in university is the ability to learn

I always joke that the best thing I learned in university is the ability to learn. Most of the actual things that were taught there were pretty standard stuff (compilers, algorithms, a bit of functional programming, monads, formal methods, linear algebra and other math, etc.). Almost none of that is stuff I use on a daily basis and I've frankly forgotten most of it. And I work with successful programmers that skipped college entirely and never learned any of that. I don't find myself building compilers that often and while I enjoy the functional programming renaissance in languages in the last ten or so years, I had to relearn a lot of that stuff as I hadn't touched any of it in 20 years. A lot of the expert systems and Bayesian belief network stuff in the nineties got obsoleted by machine learning later. While I've forgotten most of that stuff, I remember enough to get back into it when I need to. Which has happened a couple of times. Mostly, I just hit Wikipedia, read up on a bunch of things and then figure out what tools and libraries are appropriate. …