The habit that I've found useful for myself is: learn everything from the bottom (reasonable bottom). For example recently I had to learn MCU development. I bo

The habit that I've found useful for myself is: learn everything from the bottom (reasonable bottom). For example recently I had to learn MCU development. I bought some STM32 devboard, I learned ARM assembly, I learned how to use ld, as, gdb, st-util, st-flash. I wrote led blink with assembly and I can understand every single line in every file that compiles into final firmware, I can understand every byte in the firmware, I know where to find every ARM instruction. I'm not going to use assembly language other than reading some disassembly dumps, however I find it a necessary part. I'm not going to hardcode GPIO register addresses after those learning projects, I'll use CMSIS, however I need to understand the overall structure of manuals, so I did it with bare assembly and then bare C. I know that some folks are fine with firing up STM cube IDE, autogenerating some template code and fill in missing parts, not even caring much about registers. That might be my way in the future, however I still think that it's incredibly important to have solid foundations and build knowledge upon this foundation, rather than some weak "magic".