A must for every programmer: • Basic data structures • Sorting and searching • Graphs and trees • Approximation algorithms • Dynamic programming • Complexity analysis This list is neither exhaustive nor optional, despite what many anons will tell me in the replies to this post. Of course, you can make money without knowing any of this. You can have a career and live happily ever after, but how much will you leave on the table? Somebody always wonders how knowing Dijkstra's algorithm helps write CSS and HTML. The answer is simple: it's your way out of writing CSS and HTML for the rest of your life! And now we have Artificial Intelligence. And every report I read says that coding will be one of the more vulnerable areas. It makes sense: coding is very structured, easy to verify, and most of us hate writing code anyway. Automating "writing the code" makes a lot of sense. But deciding what code to write in the first place is the hard part. Programmers aren't going anywhere, but that doesn't mean everyone is safe. A thought exercise for you: Who will be the last standing? Is outsourcing your knowledge to third-party libraries a good, long-term strategy? Yesterday, I watched a video of Daviz Muñoz, a 3 Michelin star chef recognized as 2022's Best Chef in the World. He mentioned that the better he got at cooking, the more time he spent studying. Day and night. Studying non-stop. Think about that.