Here are a few more.

* The (brilliant) infrastructure engineer who described his modus operandi as 'I read stuff on Reddit and then try it out.' This engineer is now worth, as a conservative estimate, in the neighborhood of $50 million. So maybe more of us should be doing that.

* Another infrastructure engineer, also very effective, who made a habit of booking an external training session (sometimes a series, weekly) for how to set up and integrate every piece of technology we used.

* An engineer (this one is quite famous, and we have only interacted professionally a few times) who simply wrote the best comments in the world. Every method was adorned with a miniature essay exploring the problem to be solved, the tradeoffs, the performance, the bits left undone. I think about those comments quite often.

As an addendum, though, I will say that the best engineers overall all shared a trait - they kept trying things until they got something working. That alone will take you pretty far.