Any strategies you employ when it comes to reading? Does it come down to mostly practice or can you read a whitepaper once and implement it the following day? How much of the effort is just memorization?
I've been programming since elementary school, always curious what other people do to quickly pick up engineering.
I'm not sure I have any useful advice regarding reading, other than doing quite a bit of it (though these days a lot of it is net stuff, which is varied in quality). Lately I've been reading a whole bunch of papers on GPU, both 2D rendering and how GPU's work (the Citadel stuff is a good read). A couple years ago I read a ton of stuff on CRDT's, and while it obviously grabbed my attention at the time, I look back and kinda regret the effort spent on it.
Hope this is at least interesting, if not helpful.
It's just interesting to hear it from another person. Reading isn't all that special just gotta do a lot of it and keep yourself engaged.