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

24. Celebrate your wins
Learning to program can be a really difficult process, so when you accomplish something, even if its small, celebrate it! I keep track of my wins in Google Keep so, if I have a bad day, I can come back to those wins and remember them!
25. Programming is awesome
Programming is really cool because you get to build things. I always come back to this Sandi Metz quote:
Those of us whose work is to write software are incredibly lucky. Building software is a guiltless pleasure because we get to use our creative energy to get things done. We have arranged our lives to have it both ways; we can enjoy the pure act of writing code in sure knowledge that the code we write has use. We produce things that matter. We are modern craftspeople, building structures that make up present-day reality, and no less than bricklayers or bridge builders, we take justifiable pride in our accomplishments.
This all programmers share, from the most enthusiastic newbie to the apparently jaded elder, whether working at the lightest weight Internet startup or the most staid, long-entrenched enterprise. We want to do our best work. We want our work to have meaning. We want to have fun along the way.
Sandi Metz

Learning Tips for Programmers

One of the most challenging but exciting parts of being a programmer is that the field is constantly evolving and the learning is never done. Learning is a topic near and dear to my heart: I'm a mostly self-taught developer, I studied education in college, and I taught at a bootcamp for years. I wanted to write down some of my tips for learning in hopes that these may help you in your process.

Planning

The first stage of learning is the planning phase: what should you learn in the first place. For those just starting out, figuring out what you need to know will be the first step. For those more established in the field, you'll probably have a topic that you need to learn for some reason or another.
If you're just starting out, I recommend exploring first -- try writing some code, following some tutorials (here are some of my favorites), and figuring out what you enjoy. Then figure out what your learning goal is: do you want to become a professional developer, do it as a hobby, or add an additional tool to your skill-set?
Once you have a list of skills you need to learn, create a learning plan. This may evolve over time as you learn more about the topic, but having an outline of what you need to learn will help you allocate time and structure your materials. Here is a great video on how to create a learning plan.