experienced dev, new to ESP32 DIY - what are your pro-tips?

howdy all - stoked to join the community, have ordered all the hardware for a wireless water level monitor & stoked for a new DIY project. microcontrollers = ELEGOO 3PCS ESP-32

i'm a seasoned Data Scientist/engineer, work as Dir of MLops in AWS & GCP. have been using GPTs since day 1. so have pretty advanced coding workflows, when it comes to standard python / SQL / Spark etc - data pipelines in the cloud. Primarily use VSCode & Antigravity IDEs as daily drivers.

but i'm not sure how well these skills will translate to the ESP32 projects.

Is there a better IDE? software wise, is there a better setup to use?

looking for pro-tips so I can avoid rookie mistakes & weeks of headache - so if ya have any words of wisdom, please share 🤓

UPDATE - visited the wiki, and lots of good intro info there. will read it thru.

but there has gotta be some tricks of the trade not mentioned there. for folks that have been at this for a while, what's one thing you wish you knew at the beginning that you now know only thru experience??