Tips for New Developers

One of the most common question asked by blog readers is “What are your tips for new programmers?” So, we thought it was time for us to write up our thoughts and Experience.

1. Have your reason, and remember it:

If we want to start programming, we need a reason for that. It can be that we love writing code, we need to have a much lucrative career, or that we are doing a bunch of Excel work and we want to make that more successful. We need to keep track of that reason; programming is hard, and we can get frustrated at times. It will be much needed to remember that reason and to stick with it.

1. Build a solid foundation:

The advice we will give now might sound very unique, but we think its really helpful. Before we start writing code, if we haven’t looked at math in a while, we would revise the logics from basic Algebra. Most of programming is built on mathematics like functions and variables. Revisiting these concepts besides programming will be quite valuable in the future.

1. Find a community:

One more thing that will be really helpful is finding a community to back us up as we start writing code. This community will be essential as other people will be in the same place as us, offer resources that helped them, and give us encouragement. We would suggest finding a meetup in our area as the top solution here, even small towns mostly have a group somewhat nearby.

1. Break down problems into smaller ones:

Another most important part of coding is taking a big problem and breaking it into smaller and simpler pieces until those pieces are solvable. If we are looking at a clean text editor not knowing where to start, it may be because we haven’t broken down the problem enough.

1. Pseudocode:

In reference to the previous point, a lot of times it is quite beneficial to note down in detail what we are trying to do in simple words before even trying to write code. This step is known as pseudocoding, and it can be done in whatever form we want it to. It can also assist us to solve a problem really slowly in hard form first, just thinking about or even writing down the individual steps we are taking to for solving that problem.

1. Embrace the cycle of learning:

If we are learning to code as a part time career, specially if we have been away from the classroom for a while, understanding how to learn is going to be a major part of our process. There are lots of highs and lows involved, which is very normal! we would brace ourselves for that ride before even starting out.