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

14. Love your error messages
Error messages are super helpful, but when you are starting out that red error message can be terrifying! One huge step to take is to read through those messages, understand them, and then use them to solve the problem. In fact, you will get to a point where a program silently failing will be far more annoying than a useful error message!
15. Some programming languages are easier than others
There isn't a right answer for what programming language to learn first; however, some will be easier to pick up. My top three are Python, Ruby, and JavaScript because all three have a large community behind them, have more straightforward syntax, and are interpreted, so you don't need to go through a compiling process.
16. You don't need to know everything
It is straight up 100% impossible to know everything about programming. Nobody knows every programming language, every single method that's out there, every library and framework, or the perfect solution to every problem. Don't worry about learning everything, just focus on what you do know and extending that.
17. Depth over Breadth
Learning one thing in depth is better than learning a tiny bit about a lot of things, especially at first. That in-depth knowledge will carry over and make learning that next thing easier. Put the blinders on, so you don't get tempted to drop what you're learning and move to something new.
18. Focus on the fundamentals first
The fundamentals of programming are invaluable, and you will use them no matter what you end up doing with programming. Focus on having a solid knowledge of loops, conditionals, functions, data types, and (in most languages) object-oriented programming before moving on to learning about that awesome library that everyone's talking about. It will be so much easier to learn that library once you know the fundamentals really well. They will also carry over from language to language, so you only have to really learn them once -- after that it's just syntax!