25 Tips for New Developers: Advice from a (Mostly) Self-Taught Software Engineer

Motivation

Motivation is also a challenging piece of doing side work, and I'm so imperfect at always being motivated. I give myself lots of breaks, and I remind myself that this I'm choosing to do. I do have some advice for getting and staying motivated.
First, I love having groups of friends that I "mastermind" with. We inspire each other with our work, commiserate over the hard parts, and discuss strategies for growth. I love working with other people, and working on projects with other people or at least talking to them about those projects is a huge source of motivation for me.
I also utilize the two-minute rule -- if something takes two minutes or less, I just have to get it done. Having one thing crossed off of my to-do list starts the ball rolling, and I usually get more done.
Sometimes, I set a timer and timebox how long I'll spend on something -- "I don't feel like writing right now, but if I spend five minutes on it, I'll be closer to where I want to be." I rarely want to stop at the end of those five minutes, but it's a great trick for getting me started on something.
I also am really motivated by finishing things -- leaving them half-done really bothers me. So I usually break tasks into smaller and smaller sub-tasks and focus on completing sub-tasks. This makes me feel more accomplished and like I'm making progress, so I'll be much less likely to abandon the project.

Communication

One of the most difficult things to handle when my social media following grew was the non-stop messages. From people requesting advice to spam to lovely comments about my work, I was all the sudden getting hundreds of communications a day. I receive, on average, 100 mentions on Twitter a day, 15-20 Twitter direct messages, and 50-70 emails. It's a lot.
At first, I would respond to everything. With a lot of thought and care -- essentially writing personalized blog posts for anyone who asked me a question. It wasn't scalable. I still feel some guilt, but I don't respond to everything anymore. I have so much content that's open to the public, which scales so much better than offering 1:1 advice. I also mute my own tweets after a little while if they get a lot of attention, and I have filters so I don't get any notifications from social media. I do, however, have Tweetdeck set up to show me all mentions and quote tweets so that I can quickly mass respond to people.
I also have a system for my emails. I have three folders in my inboxes: today, this week, and this month. When an email comes in, I delete it or put it in one of these folders. I respond to today emails every weekday, this week emails on Mondays, and this month emails at the end of the month. I also add emails that will take some time to my to-do list so that I can allot that time better. I'm also really interested in implementing this email system down the road. It seems awesome, it just takes some time to get used to.