Short post today as I’m actively debugging a production issue. (What a fun way to start your day...)
To understand the future you first need to understand the past.
That is why I think it is important to spend time reading academic papers both old ones that form the foundation of the current state of programming and new ones that introduce new ideas and allow you to peek in a possible future.
A good way to get started is through Papers We Love:
You can start reading some of the papers at their Github repo or watch one of the videos on their Youtube channel.