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

Learning in Public

One of my favorite quotes is, "When one teaches, two learn." by Robert Heinlein. One of the best ways to solidify your knowledge on a topic is to teach it to someone else. You can create resources for the public, like blog posts or videos, or you can explain your learnings to a friend or even a meetup or conference! Here's a great resource on why and how to learn in public.

Quiz Yourself

Make it Stick is an awesome book about how to solidify concepts in your memory. I generally believe that understanding is more important than memorization for most developers, but if you're studying for interviews or tests you may need to focus more on memorization. The authors of "Make it Stick" recommend quizzing yourself to build up recall. You could build up a flashcard deck on the topic you're learning or challenge yourself to create something or solve a code challenge without any resources.

Come Back to Topics

Instead of learning a topic all at once, come back to it continuously. Spaced repetition is when you have shorter study blocks with breaks in between your sessions. So, you may start learning a topic one week, then come back to it a week later, and then a week after that. This time in between will force you to review and recall your new knowledge, solidifying the neural patterns for retrieving the information. Have you been told that cramming for tests is a bad strategy? This is why!
A potential plan that utilizes spaced repetition may look like this:

• 
  Day one: Learn CSS fundamentals
  
• 
  A week later: Learn a CSS concept that builds on the fundamentals
  
• 
  A week after that: Build a project that uses both concepts
  

You don't necessarily need to re-read the same tutorial, but make yourself review topics so that they become more and more familiar. Learning something once usually doesn't make it stick.