[thumper]

When I was in high school and college, my measure was to enter programming contests where competition was on time and following a spec. I did well on these, and I agree with earlier posters that this boils down to being familiar with a language and its libraries, as well as the most common algorithms that show up time and again in these contests.

As I've "matured", I feel like my raw speed is slowing down. I think that there are a lot of factors in that, like working on much more challenging problems, and switching back and forth between too many languages (so that I don't know any one quite as well).

Really, I think it's better to worry about working on stuff that you love, rather than how fast you're doing it.