Matt Rickard shares 31 reflections after putting his time 10k hours in programming:

These are reflections only about pure coding — no lessons sum up to “programming is about people” or “how to be a senior technical leader” (arguably more important to a career, but not the topic of this post).

These reflections are just about deliberately writing code for 10,000 hours. Most don’t apply to beginners. These reflections are not career advice. Think of them as lessons on being a technical guitarist, not about being a good band member. They are about becoming a better programmer for yourself.

Here’s the first one, just to whet your whistle:

Browsing the source is almost always faster than finding an answer on StackOverflow.