After I worked as a software engineer, even for years I still lacked basic skills. and someone has to point it out to you.

This page will include these skills. and others that I have seen other engineers lack. I will limit it to basics. No advanced skills.

Touchtyping ¶

I used to pick-and-hunt. Look at the keyboard and pick the key. That is slow, although when you start using computers you instictively do that and you get faster at it.
You won’t understand how comfortable and faster you can get by touchtyping.
The recommendation I got from the colleague that spotted this lack of skill was gtypist. a GNU application, in the terminal and you can install it on any linux machine.
Train for as much as you can. You get slower in the beginning as your muscle memory adjusts then you get way faster and more comfortable with the keyboard.

VIM Modal navigation ¶

I don’t use VIM, I’m an Emacs guy. but also I use VIM bindings in Emacs because it’s very comfortable. On Linux/Mac many applications will use the shell pager which uses VIM bindings by default.
plus if you learn even the basics you can switch IDE/Editor if you just enable VIM keybindings in it.

I learned VIM from a book Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought by Drew Neil. It’s very intertaining and easy to read.