I'm an adult professional programmer. The gaming machine of choice when I was a kid was C-64, not NES, so I knew programming your own stuff was a thing at elementary school age. The obvious interesting thing with the computer was game programming. The (generally correct back then) received wisdom also was that any serious game programming effort with the 8-bit home computers involved assembly languages, but I wasn't able to find any manuals or software I could understand to teach myself assembly, so I never ended up learning it. A few years later the PC was the top gaming box, and assembly had given way to C (and Turbo Pascal, which was a big thing on DOS back then for some reason), I managed to learn C after a false start or two, and went off happily coding many stupid things I did not finish with it. So not much of a lesson here, not learning assembly at age 10 didn't seem to slow me down much later, and it also turned out that I never did need to learn to program 8-bit microcomputers right down to metal to make games. Still, I'm sure it would've been interesting to learn that. The big thing that made me learn programming was the intrinsic drive to want to program computer games. Any sort of achievement-endorsing authority figures were generally entirely indifferent to this. The hard things in programming for me are also ones which I suspect are inherently boring. Working with legacy codebases, working on uninteresting features that are needed for business reasons, finishing the countless little things like documentation, ports and packaging so that something can be released, and in general going from the 80 % solution to the 100 % one. I guess I could echo nyan_sandwich's admonition to teach shipping here. I did waste some time writing unnecessarily bad C++ before I read Stroustrup's book on the language, so I guess hitting the books early could help. I also crashed, burned and never recovered enough to have any degree of academic success with university leve

I am a software developer, and have glimpsed over many similar questions. To summarize: There are enormous individual differences in how one can become a better programmer, and even more so on the opinions on it. It is not even easy to agree on what basic skills should be there at the "end" (i.e., the beginning, after your first two years real experience), much less on how to get those skills. That said, most commonplace advice is valid here: * there is with high probability no really significant innate aptitude for programming (intelligence has a carry-over into many domains, however) (edit: seems I am wrong about that: See "Has “Not everyone can be a programmer” been studied?" at Programmers.StackExchange * don't expect too much skill carry-over: mathematical thinking and programming are related, but different activities * being able to concentrate for some time is good (a.k.a.: conscientiousness helps) * as a kid, liking the task probably also helps * playing the trumpet - not that much (though it can be fun) On skill-set: * The practical coding skills are always important. (Except if you want to earn more than a dev.) * Algorithmic knowledge is rarely helpful, but you will stumble at least once if you don't have it (but nobody will notice). * Mathematics is necessary only in very small areas. What should I have done? Training self-discipline would have helped (if something like that is possible). Knowing/Having somebody who is actually significantly better than me, and pushing me, would have helped (fuckarounditis on "learning" is too easy to do). My Opinion: In professional software development there is very little time to broaden your knowledge -- it goes into obscure platform and domain knowledge quite quickly, and Jobs where you do what is actually interesting are in very short supply. However, exactly this broader knowledge is what can keep you afloat even if you happen to be neurotic, unreliable, slow worker*. So: Let him do what is most inte