anonbc395's comments

" I can tell you from first hand experience that you can sell the most mundane development work, like basic jQuery and CSS site updates, for hundreds of thousands of dollars with the right opportunity."

Where could I learn more about these kinds of opportunities? Does it come from networking, domain experience?

I found the series "Write Great Code" to be helpful because they give accessible introduction to computer architecture, software engineering and compilers. It's not at the level of traditional university textbooks, but enough to understand the main ideas and bridge into more advanced texts.

Some of the other books I didn't find helpful. For example, Learn Java the Easy Way seems to be too slow for anyone with any programming experience but not enough coverage of fundamentals for beginners.

I found LeetCode difficult too. Some things that I found helpful:

1) The book How to Design Programs. Its main point: the shape of data determines the shape of functions. Northeastern University has a good course on this principle. There are several types of data, such as atomic values, constrained values, lists, and the functions for dealing with them follow the "shape" of how the data were defined.

Recursion can also follow this pattern because data can be defined recursively, such as with binary trees and linked lists. Obviously, recursion is not limited to recursively defined data, but it helps to see the relationship between functions/methods and the data they operate on.

The book and the course also discuss how to abstract general patterns from concrete instances, such as "filter", "map" and "fold".

2) Once I saw that function "structure" can follow the structure of data, I looked at the structure of functions that operate on graphs, trees, arrays, greedy problems, dynamic programming problems. There is usually a structure involved.

To get at the structure, I abstracted the details to get at the "elements" of the function and the data it operates on.

Here's one pattern: for each element of data input do something with that element

Basically all algorithms follow this pattern. Replace "do something" with a transformation, a summation, a "map", filter, fold, etc. Replace data input with tree, graph, array, etc.

3) For dynamic programming, I studied the approach used in "Optimization" courses, often taught in the context of business. In that context, DP is not taught as "finding the subproblem", but as a multistage decision process. I found this very helpful.

Lastly, even though receiving material rewards is nice, re-framing motivation towards contribution rather than receiving can mitigate disappointment in any endeavor in life.