Fiona asked Andy Hunt:

I'm an enthusiastic beginner at best - in my opinion - yet I'm tasked with the entire management of a rather big project, all on my own. In my world, Visual Studio and the entire c# world is using a lot of automation, and it's taking the programmer far away from the underlying system. Where should I begin digging through all this "convenience" towards mastering the machine as a professional programmer?

Andy Hunt Perhaps for a better understanding of the fundamentals, you'd be better off in a less magical environment.

To master the machine, you should have an understanding of OS internals (a book covering Linux would be helpful here). For programming, I'd suggest learning plain old C to understand pointers, memory, and data structures, and something like Ruby to understand OOP. Then maybe something like F# or Elixir to get a grasp on functional programming.

But as far as "professional" goes, if you provide value that someone is willing to pay for, then you're professional ;).

/\ndy

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