I'm by no means a professional academic, nor am I really even a competent programmer, but in my time in school I've observed in my peers (or perhaps fellow CS students; I'm not sure a 40 year old should refer to 20-somethings as peers) a certain lack of proficiency in what I believe are important ancillary skills. Here's a little timeline of skills you probably want to pick up during your training as a computer scientist.

Before you start formal learning

Before you sign up for your first programming class, you need to know how to use the damn computer. Not a lot, just enough to manage your files and understand guides you find online.

At a minimum, you ought to be able to:

• Navigate your file system, and visualize the relationships between directories (folders)
• Create word processor documents and spreadsheets (including some formulas)
• Create and extract compressed archives (it's OK to start with zip, but you'll eventually need to recognize other formats)
• Recognize and correctly employ common file formats by their file extension including txt, exe, csv, and pdf.
• Install application software

100 Level

Your first year you'll probably be required to use a couple of specific IDEs and you'll get to pick up some coding skills, but you're going to need more than just that. Your aim should be to completely maintain your own machine. You don't have the time to wait for tech support, nor should you ever trust the inept to touch your machine.

Now you need to be able to:

• Format your hard disk and install an operating system (Also a good idea to learn to use virtualization software like VirtualBox)
• Using the command line interface, navigate your file system and manipulate files (e.g. copy, rename, inspect, delete). Best if you have a Unix-like system (MacOS, Linux).
• Open the case and replace or add a disk. Trickier with a laptop, not advisable with a Mac. Fortunately 2nd hand machines can be found for cheap and make great and fun projects.
• Set up a network between multiple machines, and experiment with their possible interactions (like file sharing, and remote viewing)

200 Level

If your courses are anything like mine, here you start getting a bit more leeway with your tools and methods. Your professors probably won't care what IDE you use so long as it runs correctly. I'm going to ask you to do something that might be a bit painful, so maybe get some practice over the summer.

Here's what you need to be working on:

• Vim. Install it, then start with vimtutor (builtin). After that, I can recommend Luke Smith's videos. Emacs may work instead, but the computing world caters to Vim users.
• Linux, especially command line operation.
• SSH and SCP.

By the end of your 2nd year, I want you to be able to set up a Linux machine on your local network, access it through SSH, write software on it in Vim (or Emacs), compile and run it. You are going to encounter Linux machines at some point in your academic or professional computing career, and remote command line access via SSH is very often the best and fastest way to employ them.

300 Level

About now you should focus your extracurricular learning around collaboration.

This means:

• Git. Yes there are other version control products out there, and maybe they are better. Git is the standard, so become somewhat proficient.
• GitHub. Again, it doesn't need to be the best to be the standard.

As a matter of practice, create a new repository for each new coding assignment. For every feature you add, build it in a branch then merge.

I might also suggest Slack or Discord, but I really don't think those require a lot of practice.

400 Level

I've got nothing for this section right now (and it may remain that way) since these won't start for me until next fall.

End of advice.