seaworthiness

You need to work backwards from two decisions to be taken in future - your role and the area of operation.

Role is important because being a software development manager requires different skills than being a senior developer. For the latter you need to code more, understand how things work under the hood and develop a strong grasp over the fundamentals. For becoming a manager, understanding systems while preserving some abstractions is important. You also need to understand people and how you can effectively delegate. Similarly, there are other traits required for being a technical writer, a consultant or a technical program manager. Once you know the traits that will be useful for your future, invest time to nurture them.

Secondly, figuring out the area is important since you want to enjoy your work. It should be something that you are naturally excited about and see a value in. An area can be something as broad as software infrastructure or as specific as distributed message brokers. Once this is figured out, you can intensively read up on the relevant topics to gather knowledge and develop depth. This should be helpful to establish yourself as a domain expert regardless of the role you play later. However, you do need to try out a lot of things to discover which one of them intensely resonates with your interests. This process should involve working on small side projects and reading up. Being naturally curious helps.

Rather than going for the big thing in software, you should probably try to understand what is the area that interests you and spend more time on topics in that area to compound your knowledge. Always going for the "next big thing" in software will help you gain familiarity with a lot of topics but you risk being spread too thin.

That being said, from the HN community I have seen a lot discussions on Rust programming language. Picking up project to learn Rust can be a good idea to be familiar with the latest trend.

Thank you. From your's and most of the other comments I understand that speed automatically develops with familiarity with the topic and does not need to (and should not) be worked on consciously. We can grow familiar with a topic only by reading more about it from different sources. This is why probably the people who are able to read faster are the ones who read a lot.