One of the best thing I done for my career (as a self taught software developer, but with a degree in electronic engineering) is to learn computation theory.

Computation is math (and a very restricted subset of math). It’s mostly specific sequences of sets manipulation. What sets and what manipulations are defined by people, not by the idea of computation.

The best thing is that as soon as you specify the sequences of manipulation, it become a a set that you can manipulate. That can be a difficult concept to grasp, but that’s what helps in designing notation that are more appropriate for the human mind to describe a solution for a specific problem.