Extra Skills

There are a lot of skills/compentencies that you will need to develop while you are taking regular courses for your software diploma. Often, your instructor mentions these as passing comments, perhaps with a few links to where you can learn more. And then, they “fall into the background”. They don’t disappear — rather, they are used in the background by your instructor. You might notice their use, you might not. But these are the things that - if you learn them - will help you stand out among your peers.

I’m including a few short pages that offer a condensed reference on these skills. If you practice them daily (like you will have to do in your job), they will serve you well throughout your career.

Using Command Line Tools

In the early days of computing, all you had were terminal commands. Since the 1990s, graphical user interfaces (GUIs) became the norm - not only for regular users, but for developers as well. Then, in the late 2000s and more prominently in the late 2010s, the terminal environment became the go-to place for any serious software developer.

Get started with the terminal environment by discovering the terminal, playing with CLIs, and daily practicing things like git and node/npm/pnpm.

Working in Visual Studio Code

The primary editor I recommend for software development is Visual Studio Code. There are some basics you should know when using this tool. There are also a number of very helpful things to know to make your time with it much more productive.

Writing Documentation

Documentation happens - or at least it should. You can make your documentation tasks easier and more enjoyable if you take the time to learn Markdown.

Version Control Everywhere

Our primary version control tool is git, and our preferred hosting is GitHub. It’s a CLI (command-line tool), and you really should get used to working with it in the terminal. Yes, there are several GUIs that (like the one built into VS Code) that help you do the “regular” tasks, but they are just a pretty face on top of git itself.

If you are serious about getting into software development, then you need to learn git in the terminal and you need to practice certain disciplines.