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

Learning Styles

I'm sure you've been asked at some point "what's your learning style?" or been told to really prioritize that when you're learning something new. It turns out that the idea of learning strategies, where some people learn best visually, others through text, others through hearing is mostly debunked. It turns out, it's advantageous to learn the same topic in multiple modalities or to use the best modality for the topic. So, use strategies and resources that work well for you, but also switch things up and try learning in different ways.

Strategies

Take Notes

There is a ton of research that taking notes when you're learning is beneficial, especially if those notes are hand-written. I normally use my iPad to write my inital notes while I'm going through a course. Then, I use Foam to further organize those thoughts and make them into something I can come back to. If you're artistic, sketch notes are so cool and the drawings will help you build connections.

Put Your Learning in Context

It's much better to learn new information in context of what you already know. I remember when I was learning React, there was a tutorial showing how to do things in both JQuery, which I knew, and React. It was so helpful to see both the familiar and unfamiliar way of doing something. Make explicit links from something you already know to something new. You can use tools like mindmapping to do this, or you could just be mindful about noting links in your normal notes!