[gfodor]

when I said "minimal time" I meant "minimal time per unit of skill increase." sorry this wasn't clear. the whole point is if your goal is to improve your skills as a programmer you should be optimizing your time to learn things that provide the largest skill increase per unit time.

as far as your first point goes, I agree that some type of random walk part is important to breaking out of local maxima. you can look to social cues for what might be a good thing to start learning about that is outside of your comfort zone. generally speaking since software is eating the world a good litmus test for me is if the domain seems to be amenable to automation and is also not as far along the curve as more "easy" domains to dive into like the latest newfangled way to build a web based CRUD app.