What are some of the most basic things every programmer should know?

There are some fundamental ideas that if you learn, you’ll be a much better programmer:
* Learn underlying systems. Have you been stuck on a bug for the past couple hours? Chances are, you don’t understand what’s happening under the hood. For instance, a lot of beginners forget that the limitation of int is +-2147483647 and then wonder why it flips to negative after a while. Those kind of things you have to study, otherwise you will remain oblivious to many ideas involving performance.
* Know command line tools. Most of the time you will spend your time working with an IDE, but there are a lot of the times a simple command can save you a lot of time. Tools like find, diff, vi/vm, sed, awk, can be tremendously helpful. Like when you need to find a file that needs to change right fucking now because production is broken and Joe fat fingered a URL, so now the file is located in a folder named “Fiji.”
* Learn to write tests. A lot of people, including me, fudged on this for a long time. “I don’t need to write tests, I’m awesome. What would I use that for?” Don’t be like me. If you write tests before you begin developing, you will save a ton of time. The reason being, you know exactly what you need to create to solve the unit test. There’s no losing your train of thought on what exactly you need to do; you already have it written out.
* Play well with others. The stereotypical hacker dude in his basement coding some scripts is all too common. If you want to actually make money though, chances are you will be working with a team of people. Frequently, programmers are not the most social people, so if you can stand out in terms of social ability, you’ll be set to possibly become a consultant or get another high paying job.