might as well ask how you become the best author in the world. Same question.

But I don't want to be the greatest author, I want to be greatest programmer!

Maybe this thread was too ambitious. How about just becoming a great programmer? How would a mediocre programmer could become much better?

idk. It depends on what field of programming you're trying to do. Also how you define programming. It's a really vague thing to want to be good at.

You'll be fortunate if you can count yourself as a 10X programmer.

What's a 10X programmer?

>>5
Is there really that much differences between the fields? I'm skeptical about that. There might be different constraints but I'd like to believe that they are fundamentally the same activity. But I'm open to reconsider my position.

I was thinking about how to decompose programming into smaller activities, that would be easier to improve at, but it's pretty hard. If I take something like debugging, that's certainly an important part of programming, but is it actually any easier to practice than programming itself? I don't feel like I've gotten closer to an answer this way.

Greatest or the most successful? I think you could be the best one in the world, but it wouldn't necessarily become a successful career and get you fame and fortune.
I guess... practice a lot? Some people just have brains that do certain things better, though, and if you don't have that kind of brain you could be limited.

>>9
Greatest, I am not after fame and fortune but competence. Practice, yes, but what and how? I can keep doing exercises from textbooks but those seem to cover only a limited domain of programming.

>>10
Probably something you're born with combined with lots of effort I would guess. Do you feel like a programming god and things come to you naturally? If so, maybe you have what it takes.
Hard work just doesn't beat natural genius