It's a safe bet that if something was relevant twenty years ago, and still is today, then it will also be relevant in ten years from now. Examples: OS fundament

It's a safe bet that if something was relevant twenty years ago, and still is today, then it will also be relevant in ten years from now. Examples: OS fundamentals, networking fundamentals, low level languages, embedded development, shell/bash scripting, vim, emacs. It's nearly impossible to look at a new technology and determine if it will be around in 10 years. But you know for sure that these timeless fundamentals will still be relevant, so the first step should be mastering all of those. Example: Unix system administration fundamentals are not going anywhere and are more important than ever in the age of containers and developers owning more parts of the stack. It's funny to read blogposts like "check out this problem we ran into with docker" that is really just a rediscovery of a long-known problem in system administration. Example: the recent post from codeship about running thousands of containers on one network. Surprise, they ran into issues with an overflowing arp cache.