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

8. Find your niche
There are a lot of worlds within programming, find one world that you love and focus on that. Instead of trying to learn 8 programming languages, frontend and backend, compiled and interpreted languages, all the text editors and developer tools, etc. Find a few things you are really interested in and get good at them.
9. Get good at pattern recognition
Recognizing patterns in code is one of the most important skills you can have. When people talk about writing "DRY" code (i.e., Don't Repeat Yourself) they are talking about reducing the patterns in your code. I recommend the game Set for pattern recognition -- you can even play online each day on the New York Times' website!
10. Make good habits early
It will be easier to write clean code in the future if you get into the habit early. Bad habits can be hard to break. Here are my tips for writing cleaner code. If you are doing web development, running HTML and CSS validators on your code can tell you exactly what to fix!
11. Identify your learning style
Everybody learns differently -- whether that means you are a visual learner, love videos, need somebody to push you, or you love documentation, you will learn best differently than the person next to you. Identify how you learn best, and rely on resources that fit that style well. For example, I learn best from reading documentation and code examples from that documentation, and I lose focus easily in tutorials.
12. Struggle, but not too much
Struggling a little bit when you are learning is really important so that you can solve the problem yourself and find an answer using resources that exist. That being said, it can become unproductive and demotivating to struggle with a problem for too long. After a few hours, reach out to someone for help!
13. Get comfortable with failure
Programming is hard, and finding the right answer won't be immediate. One of the most pivotal moments in my programming journey was failing at writing a Sudoku solver. It can be challenging to adjust to not getting everything right away and seeing those error messages, but that is a huge part of programming.