For anything you want to learn in your life the best thing you should learn: Learn from the Masters, do not seek advice in random people on Internet. It is ca

For anything you want to learn in your life the best thing you should learn: Learn from the Masters, do not seek advice in random people on Internet. It is called "modeling". Pick your masters-mentors carefully. For example we have people in my company that could do the work of tens or hundreds of people just by themselves because: -they are incredible experienced and smart. -they know regular expressions, know how to automate everything. -they understand good design, and understand people as well as computers. Just living around this people you will start modeling them, and doing the same they do. But people also model bad behaviors just by proximity. Fat people use to have friends that are fat, and family members that are fat. The same happens with smokers or drug addicts. You pick from your surroundings subconsciously. For example someone here recommends you to not use vim, use an IDE. Well , the masters I know either use vim or emacs a lot. They can use other tools like IDEs too, but instead of depending on someone else for automating the stuff they need they use to make their own tools. Remember that no big company like Microsoft, Apple or Google are going to make your life easier for making your software multi platform for example, but for your company it could be essential. On the contrary, if you only use their tools your life will be miserable if you go against the interest of those companies.