I agree with the basic premise, except for the tooling bit. Yes, tools aren't everything and you shouldn't obsess about them. But just picking one and calling i

I agree with the basic premise, except for the tooling bit. Yes, tools aren't everything and you shouldn't obsess about them. But just picking one and calling it a day is - at least in my opinion - a waste, if you havent even considered the alternatives. Curiosity also plays into the environment you use to develop: I've known a couple of people who would almost recoil from any tool that was not part of the IDE they learned a decade ago. This is not helpful. So, if you can: Try what interests you. See what you like after a day or two. For example, I like the *NIX command line very much, just because I can quickly improvise (at least temporary) solutions for a specific problem. This doesn't mean that it is a silver bullet, but it's helpful to know your way around it, and without some curiosity, I would never have tried it. Also: You dont have to be an expert - you'll get good at the things you use most, which should be those that you enjoy working with. If it doesn't "click", you'll find something else that suits you. Sometimes it's just useful to have tried something for a day or two - even Vim becomes quite usable after a couple of hours of figuring out the basic control scheme. Oh, and also: It's not unlikely the tooling you use will change over time, so clinging to a specific IDE is not necessarily going to help you. Maybe you'll work at a place that only allows certain software on some systems. In which case, knowing your way around the basic system (Bash, Windows CMD/Powershell) will almost certainly be really helpful at some point. So just try to be open for new things :)