[GrangalanJr]

As someone who has started studying programming and CS recently, avoiding becoming a guy who "glues APIs together" has been one of my goals. I want to learn the underlying principles, not just the surface-level implementations that change every few years.

[sanderjd]

Absolutely do learn the fundamentals. Be able to look off into space and imagine the flow of a system at many different levels of abstraction. Understand how compilers, interpreters, and operating systems wrangle your hardware into submitting to your will. Learn and design algorithms. Spend time thinking about how your computer gets from point A to point B for every program you use. Do all those things and more, but then be willing to embrace being somebody who "glues APIs together" when appropriate, or somebody who creates new APIs when appropriate, or somebody who creates new APIs using others that you have glued together, and then make something with all that abstract, algorithmic thinking and all that glue.