Stay awake, pay attention, and love what you do.

Clearly, everyone commenting here must be doing so from the position of believing themselves to be good programmers with pure skill sets already in place. I have to include myself in that assessment, of course. But, note how we are all a little different. Or a lot. So I agree with those who emphasize attitude, although even in that there is a lot of wiggle room. What we have are anecdotes, not prescriptions - we can tell our stories but you know, really, everyone's path to mastery will be different. Different drives, different talents, different happy accidents. But, much time, much dedication, much passion, and not only freedom from the fear of making mistakes but rejoicing in them - opportunities for learning, and the shorter term the joys of debugging and problem solving.

For, if one does not love the journey for itself, one will never stay the course.

For myself, I fell into computers as a career entirely by accident, aided by a perceptive girlfriend's advice when I was down and out as a 2nd year Physics undergrad in 1967, forced to drop out by family issues. No degree, 19 years young, and basically a C student. She suggested I seek a job as a programmer.

Not surprisingly, none of the big 5 were particularly interested despite my perfect scores on their aptitude tests. (? what ?). But one passed me on to a different track at a sister company, and to my great surprise they hired me on the spot to debug their computers as they came out of manufacturing. I have no idea what they saw in me, but it was a revelation. I could do it. From day one. Room sized hand built discrete component monsters. Elliott 4100 series.

And ever since, that job included, I have always been surprised that people want to actually pay me to do what I love, and to ride out those unpredictable deep thought intermissions when nothing apparent is happening with me. That I am still fully employed, at senior technical levels, is I think a token of how I am perceived, and I take it t be my qualification for commenting here.

So. Passion. Joy of challenges. Endurance, persistence, and open to the luck of the draw wrt career path (mine looks like a classical Drunkards Walk - transistors to pixels, ALU to 4G graphical language design). Always learning, always doing new stuff, always going where no-one has gone before - and short of an academic career this pressing out on the boundaries has to be pretty special to computers.

And the tools. The original question. There is no prescriptive answer to that one. For every project, often even every phase, there are new things to learn and invent, and the invention part usually has to include custom tools. And, personally, I gave up learning the current technological SOA in tools just for the learning, because typically by the time they became the right one for a new task they were already outmoded and something else was in vogue. So my tool focus is whatever helps me do the work right now. Picking new tools and technology up quickly are the key. And I don't think that can be taught. It is one's mental toolkit that is the key, one's habits and tricks of thought and problem solving in their most abstract meanings. And I believe only love of the work brings those forth. Because we are all wired differently, some more differently than others, and we all have different satori moments which result in the laying down of the memes of Mind that shape those tools.

In short, stay awake, and pay attention, and love what you do. The rest will take care of itself.

Oh, yes, one more thing. Think of the poor folks who have to maintain what you did after you have moved on. Or, as was my painful jab for this, even if it is yourself six months later. Style is a tool unto itself.