Rich Hickey has some great talks on YouTube.<p>If you are a software engineer:<p>Build a simple database, a simple interpreter, and a simple web application (backend and frontend). Read about “distributed systems”, “devops”, “Conway’s Game Of Life”, and “fractals”. Read about these technologies/techniques (in whatever order is comfortable), how they work, their pros and cons, why they were created, how they compare to alternatives: “TCP”, “Open Sound Control”, “Plan9”, “REST”, “Lisp”, “Erlang”, “Smalltalk”, “Forth”, “Datomic”, “event sourcing”, “reactive programming”, “communicating sequential processes”, “APL”/“J”/“K”, “Ansible”, “jq”, “graph databases”, “Apache Kafka”<p>The idea is not to become an expert in any of these, but to digest the wisdom that lies in their design and surrounding literature. Each was created after lots of careful thought by brilliant people about how to build sustainable systems.