Three things have changed my career (as a programmer/CS student): MIT/Harvard/Stanford OpenCourseWare[1], HackerNews (the past 15 months) and my MacBook Pro.

That MacBook Pro is the best things I've ever purchased. I owe a lot to that machine (and HN).

[1]: I don't mean the new www.coursera.org thing. I mean http://ocw.mit.edu, cs50.tv/cs75.tv and http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx which were all available years before Coursera and I watched "all" of them and learnt "a lot".