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The 6 Terminal Habits That Separate Senior Engineers From Everyone Else
Senior engineers don’t just know more commands — they think about the shell completely differently.
I used to be proud of my terminal setup. Custom prompt, fifty aliases, a .bashrc that looked like it was written by someone who really knew what they were doing. I’d zip through commands, chain a few pipes together, and feel good about myself.
Then I paired with a senior SRE during an incident. Watching him work was like discovering I’d been holding a pen with my fist my whole life. He wasn’t faster because he knew more shortcuts. He was faster because he didn’t make the mistakes I didn’t even know I was making.
This is what I actually changed after that session — and the sessions, outages, and code reviews that followed.
The Script Header That Saves You From Yourself
Most bash scripts I wrote early in my career had no error handling. They’d barrel forward through a failing command, produce garbage output, and I’d spend twenty minutes wondering why my deployment half-worked.
The single highest-leverage habit I picked up is putting this at the top of every script:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'
