Up until now, you have primarily been learning things that are already known; things that you can find out by reading other people’s code, or books, or academic papers; things that are good to know, but not novel.
Now it is time to break free of the boundaries, and truly ascend to mastery. Now it is time to blaze a trail into territory that nobody else has ventured into yet.
Make no mistake; this is something you won’t want to tackle until well after your “tenth year” of experience, mainly because until then you are far more likely to just be reinventing a wheel than actually doing original, novel research. But once you have a good grasp on the field, it isn’t exactly difficult to find the sweeping frontiers of untapped knowledge that await computer science.
Chances are, this will take you another ten years, if not forever. Don’t give up; remember, this should still be fun. If at any point in time you stop enjoying it, go do something else. Life is far too short to waste time trying to do something you don’t want to do anymore.
Not everyone will succeed here, but everyone who makes an attempt will benefit from the effort. Don’t let the odds get you down. Even if you never win the Turing Award, your continued growth as a programmer and your journey towards ultimate mastery depends on you constantly stretching – and, to that end, tackling hard, unsolved problems is the best way to stretch.
Vikram 