A phrase I came up with that I like more than "T-shaped" is "molecular skillset". A chemist would probably laugh at me but I think of it as developing seemingly independent skills (molecules <--> skills, experience, knowledge...) that end up forming bonds with other skills, sometimes in surprising ways, that together prove really powerful and can bond up even further. "T" and other tree/tendril-ish shapes are then just special cases of different bond arrangements. You can acquire skills haphazardly (though as a serial dabbler I'd caution against actively pursuing the dabbler's path without a ton of introspection), you can also take the efficient road like a university sequence where most skills are visible and have unsurprising connections to the next skills. You might have to take some seemingly unrelated course too, but you can look at those optimistically as another potential source of surprising bonds. Duds are of course possible -- I have some useless things in my brain that I don't think will ever connect with anything useful, at best they might aid in social signaling one day. (A lot of education is just signaling to show you can talk about a lot of stuff...)
Trivial example: at some point around age 17 I installed Gentoo successfully and learned a lot about gnu/linux (and some bsd) in the process. Lots of little skills formed and connected, and they continue connecting with other things to this day. Got my initial hook on vim then. Saw how nicely colorized my terminal prompt was and that opened the door to many bash customizations. One of the skills I had to learn was to understand how hard drives worked (at least to the ability to successfully partition, format, and boot them -- I did accidentally wipe a windows xp partition the first time). Some years later (age 20?) I had accidentally rm'd a couple weeks of java work without having committed it yet. But prior knowledge of the system let me know the data was still there, and I was able to recover it by scanning the disk device partition directly for the bytes. (Ended up using "grope.tcl" referenced here http://wiki.yak.net/592 which was a lot more efficient than what I was making.)
That’s way too exciting !! Really fresh perspectives.
I once tried upgrading my Windows laptop while having very less space in C drive. Windows totally crashed. After that I used live bootable Ubuntu, but would still like to retrieve all of my windows data.
Trivial example: at some point around age 17 I installed Gentoo successfully and learned a lot about gnu/linux (and some bsd) in the process. Lots of little skills formed and connected, and they continue connecting with other things to this day. Got my initial hook on vim then. Saw how nicely colorized my terminal prompt was and that opened the door to many bash customizations. One of the skills I had to learn was to understand how hard drives worked (at least to the ability to successfully partition, format, and boot them -- I did accidentally wipe a windows xp partition the first time). Some years later (age 20?) I had accidentally rm'd a couple weeks of java work without having committed it yet. But prior knowledge of the system let me know the data was still there, and I was able to recover it by scanning the disk device partition directly for the bytes. (Ended up using "grope.tcl" referenced here http://wiki.yak.net/592 which was a lot more efficient than what I was making.)