Welcome to the third part of this series aimed to help you unleash a power never seen on Earth using the Almighty Vim.

We’ll see together in this article:

“I am sorry to say that we decided against moving you to the next stage of the process, primarily for missing some essential tech skills”.

This was the email I received end of October 2020. It was the fourth rejection after spending a huge amount of time going through hiring processes, technical interviews, technical tests, and other joys. I didn’t understand what was happening: every company I worked with was happy about my work, my skills, and my involvement. As a professional developer for 10 years, I never had so many rejections in this short amount of time.

Welcome to the second part of this series aimed to make you a better Vim user!

In this article, I’ll explain more concepts, some of them making Vim truly special compared to other editors. Who wasn’t blown away discovering Vim’s macros?

You are at your desk at WeSellEverythingAndAnythingMegacorp, the fantastic e-commerce you work for. You’re trying to write some code while thinking intensively about your lunch. Suddenly, a voice break your incredible concentration. It’s Davina, your colleague developer, hired only a few moons ago. She has a problem and she thinks you can help her.

She needs to display a directory tree, and she believes that she needs to use recursion. But she never quite understood the concept.

“Why would I care about the difference between interpretation and compilation?” ask Dave, your colleague developer. “After all, this is a low level detail, and I don’t care about that! That’s why we have abstractions all over the place!”.

Dave is wrong, in many aspects. First, knowing the foundations supporting the high level abstractions you use every day, as a developer, will give you an edge to understand quickly whatever is built upon them. Programming languages, frameworks, you name it. Second, knowing the difference between compilation and interpretation will help you debug, improve performances, and deploy the software you’ve built. It’s a very important subject we need to understand, even roughly.