Skills I'm glad I have

Harold Combs

Too long for a tweet.

Too short for a blog post.

These are some tech-related skills I’m glad I have.  They come in awfully handy:

  • Touch typing.  You’d be surprised at the number of people who work with computers for a living who can’t actually touch type.  

  • Markdown.  Markdown is incredibly handy for tossing-off documentation and forum responses.  I’ve actually considered hosing this blog entirely and converting to posts hosted on Github, formatted in Markdown.

  • Vim.  I’ve rediscovered a love for Vim in the past few weeks.  I’ve intentionally avoided installing Sublime Text 3 on my work machines, just so I’d get better with Vim.  This thing is a frickin’ katana for text editing (duh…)

  • Ruby.  A surprising number of production programmers don’t have a scripting language under their belt, which is a shame.  Ruby is both light enough for scripting and powerful enough to do basically anything you need.  (Just write RSpecs for anything > 100 lines, m’kay?)

  • Unix command line.  I’m blessed to work at a place that’s all *Nix, all the time, so getting better with unix commands and pipes is a must.  Just off the top of my head:

  • sed

  • tr

  • tree

  • find and its many switches

  • xargs

Next up: A post about the things I wish I knew better.  Hint: JavaScript is definitely on there.