Day to day, I think a surprising amount of engineering productivity comes from small nuggets of knowledge: being aware that a language feature exists; knowing that an unexplained tcp delay is probably related to the TCP_NO_DELAY setting and Nagle’s algorithm; knowing the right git incantation to get out of a pickle; or knowing a trick with sed to rewrite a file. In one sense, this is self-evident: anything you know is going to be made up of smaller pieces of knowledge. Of course those smaller pieces of knowledge matter. But I think there are some nuggets of knowledge that are particularly valuable and don’t require a lot of supporting mental infrastructure. You don’t need to know any python to use python3 -m http.server to start a simple server in a directory, but it might still make your work marginally easier. Let me share a few examples: You probably know that ctrl + r allows searching your terminal’s command history, but if you install fzf , you can set it up so that ctrl + r does a fuzzy search.…