Important Skills
This is a list of skills that have served me in all my tech work so far, so I consider them generally useful to learn and maintain. Written mostly for myself, but could be useful for people just starting out or as a reminder.
- Git
- working in the command line
- relational databases and SQL
- regular expressions
- using search engines effectively (and I guess now prompting effectively, but often I can still get what I want faster with search)
- debugging (reproducing the bug, narrowing it down, using effective logging, IDE debuggers & breakpoints)
- JavaScript (along with HTML & CSS)
- scripting (sh/bash for Linux or batch/powershell for Windows)
- MS Excel (you can't escape)
- VSCode (keyboard shortcuts, workspaces, multicursor stuff)
- containerization, how stuff like docker works
- code review, from both sides (learn to take criticism when appropriate, learn to give good feedback that teaches something)
- reading attentively (take your time! there's no rush!)
- listening and understanding people (very important!!)
- communication, how to explain something to someone based on their domain of expertise
- learning new things, keeping an open mind
- having (rough is ok) mental models of how things work under the hood: compiler, OS, CPU, browser engine, etc