Somewhat surprising there is no mention of basic design principles, or understanding the quirks of human perception. My brother was a production artist for some well-known computer games in the '90s-'00s, and continually complained about programmers and managers with zero visual sense, or curiosity about understanding the artists' side.

Graphics aren't my specialty, but as a musician, sound designer and producer, by far the most effective/influential audio DSP coders I'm aware of understand the basics of music, the physics/acoustics of sounds, and the gotchas at the interface between discrete digital processes and how we perceive and interpret stimuli.

I think that Khan Academy has a lot of graphics programmers that you might be interested in seeing. They use processing js. https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/b...

This guy has some good art: https://www.khanacademy.org/profile/kaid_1019042693170894950...

Immutability. Semantics.

1. Familiarity with all GL APIs, but deep focus on 1 or 2.

If you want to work with Windows, probably DirectX.

2. Make awesome shaders. Check this out: https://fragcoord.xyz

I would say being a long-time user of Photoshop and Blender helps a lot. It's not a main tool, but supplemental. Maybe AI will take over some of this though.

Hell, maybe that other stuff too, hahaha!

trigonometry->Coordinate Geometry -> Linear Algebra applied to graphics

Once you have that intuition, the rest is all figuring out the stages of the graphics pipeline and the frameworks like opengl and their constituent data structures.

Today, I would not recommend anybody to go into graphics programming:

I started in 2001, when NVidias first Geforce 1 ("the Gigatexl shadercard") was first announced: The field developed since then with so much speed and innovations, it blows my mind of. Compared to what we could do 25years ago, the tech today is just fu*ing impressive.

Though, with this impressiveness comes a big "but": The space is developing at a speed which is really really scary. Nvidia came up with AI-based effects to influence scene & assets on their own - back then, we wouldnt have even thought about that this will be possible some day in realtime.

I do not know if its possible at all to be a "decent pro" in this field now - let me use other words: "Where is todays Jon Carmack?" - he was famous for squeezing everything out of the hardware, using ideas very hidden in the community etc. - today, there is not any competitive moat for people like him (he actually lives on his legacy), and that is because the field is so vast and evolving so fast that there is no chance to become the next one