Thanks for the answer! If there is any resource that you remember had an important impact in your learning path as a scalable application programmer I'd very much appreciate to hear about it. Cheers.
I think reading about (and looking at the code) for things you use and trying to understand how they work under the hood has been super useful: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
Having smart people around to learn from is extremely helpful too.
Happy to chat more if you'd like. Just drop me a line: connor[at]opendoor[dot]com