[gregjor]

Practice, a lot. On real projects when possible. There's no shortcut and no substitute for experience.

You need peers and mentors. Practice only gets you so far if you don't have people telling you what you are doing right and wrong. Don't take criticisms of your code personally.

Read lots of code. Learn to run code in your head.

Don't just learn languages and tools. You have to master some subset of available tools, but you also need domain expertise, people skills, and judgment to succeed.

Master Unix/Linux and the shell and command line tools. Master a text editor. Understand version control (git) and collaboration.