5 Essential Tips for Beginner Software Developers

There’s no nice way to say it: starting to code is weird. One minute you’re smug because your “Hello World” prints and you feel like a demi-God, the next you stare at a screen for an hour wondering why a tiny typo has ruined your life. That’s the background noise of learning. It’s loud, annoying and – weirdly – useful. You learn a lot from the embarrassment. If you want a bit of formal structure as you stumble through those early mistakes, there are organises programs that can help you Excel as a software developer with ServiceNow University, but don’t treat those as magic shortcuts.

Benefits of Strengthening Your Software Developer Skills

Improving your skills as a developer can open the door to more job opportunities, help you work more efficiently, increase your chances of getting promoted, and make you a more valuable member of your team. It’s also one of the most rewarding parts of being a developer. Many people choose this career because it offers endless opportunities to solve problems and build things. Learning new technologies is a great way to sharpen those abilities even further.

5 Essential Tips for Beginner Software Developers

They’ll help, sure, but the real changes come from doing the boring, repetitive stuff: writing a function five different ways, breaking it, fixing it, and then making it a bit cleaner. You will copy tutorials. You will copy badly. You will learn to stop copying blindly. That’s the arc. Also – quick aside – you’ll swear at your editor more than once. Okay, moving on.

1. Learn the basics properly (not the shiny new thing everyone’s tweeting about)

Trust me, frameworks are seductive. Hot new JS thing? Sure, it looks cool on demos. But if you jump straight into a framework you don’t really understand, you’re building a house on a swamp. Start with one language and get comfortable with its simplest bits: loops, conditionals, functions, how data gets moved and mutated. Many people ease into this with python because, well, it reads like plain English sometimes and that lowers the barrier a lot. Do tiny projects – a shopping list app, a small script that renames files for you, something that actually does one small useful thing – and iterate.

Do it badly first, fix it second. Repeat. And don’t be afraid to be boring: a solid grasp of fundamentals makes everything else easier later. Honestly, it’s the difference between being someone who can piece together other people’s code and being someone who can design something from scratch without panicking. Also, if you get bored, add a dumb feature – timers, colours, whatever – just so you keep momentum.

2. Read other people’s code like it’s a trashy novel (but useful)

Writing code is only half the game. The other half – and you’ll see this later, I promise – is reading other people’s code. It’s how you pick up idioms, patterns, naming sense, and, crucially, what not to do. Go look at github repos that are small and well-documented. Don’t try to swallow a massive enterprise project on day one; that is a mistake. Pick something with 200–500 lines, clone it, run it, then open every file and poke around until it makes sense. Break stuff. Change variable names. Add a log line and see what the output looks like. You’ll learn practices like clear commit messages, sensible function boundaries, and how seasoned devs structure error handling. And you’ll learn – almost by accident – how to avoid the kind of unreadable code that makes you want to cry. It’s oddly intimate, reading someone else’s thinking. Like reading a diary, except the diary sometimes explodes.

3. Train your brain to solve problems, not to memorize tricks

People brag about remembering weird syntax like it’s a badge. Don’t buy it. The useful ability is the one that helps you think through a problem when you haven’t seen it before.

When your code misbehaves – and it will – pause, describe the bug out loud or in a comment, and then break the problem into tiny steps. Use pseudocode. Use prints/logs. Remove parts until the bug stops.

That process trains your debugging muscles far more than cramming a command list into your head. Practically: write down what you expect to happen, line by line, then check which expectation fails.

A lot of the time you’ll find that the problem is a small conceptual slip: wrong index, off-by-one, mismatch of types.

The more you practice this kind of stepwise thinking, the less flustered you become when the unexpected happens. Also: Google is your friend. Everyone looks stuff up. It’s not cheating; it’s how software development works.

4. Use version control early – please don’t learn it later under stress

If you’ve never done the “oops I overwrote the only working file” dance, consider yourself lucky, and then learn Git immediately. Version control isn’t optional; it’s basic hygiene. Learn to commit often with good messages, use branches for experiments, and merge sensibly.

The real magic is that it lets you try risky ideas without the fear. You can make a mess, then revert to a stable point. That safety changes how you approach problems – you’ll try things you otherwise wouldn’t. Start with tiny repos, push to a remote, then practice rolling back a commit, or creating a branch and merging it.

It takes a day to learn the basics and saves you weeks of stress later. Also, push your projects to a public account eventually; it’s the simplest portfolio you’ll ever build. People hire for curiosity and for the ability to show work in progress. If you’ve got a history of changes, it shows growth, not perfection.

5. Build stuff that matters to you, crash it, patch it, then show people

Stop waiting until you “know enough” – you will never feel ready. Pick a stupid, small project and build it. Make a blog, a tiny habit tracker, a nonsense bot that posts jokes – who cares. The point is to build the muscle of finishing things and then improving them. You will break it. You will hate it. You will fix it. Over and over. That feedback loop is more instructive than any tutorial. Keep an eye on the ecosystem too; read a bit about programming latest updates now and then to steal ideas and see what people are excited about. But don’t obsess about chasing every new buzzword – use new tools to solve problems, not to chase status. Lastly, share your progress. Post a repo, write a short post about the dumb mistake you fixed, and someone might comment with a better approach, or – plot twist – offer a job or mentorship. Community matters. People will surprise you by being helpful if you show effort and vulnerability.

How to Improve Your Software Developer Skills

One of the most effective ways to grow as a developer is by gaining hands-on experience with different programming languages, frameworks, and tools. Whether you’re just starting out or already established and aiming to level up, there are countless resources available to help you learn faster and write better code.

If you’re interested in moving into a leadership or senior role, it’s also helpful to deepen your understanding of software development methodologies like Agile or DevOps. These frameworks are essential for managing projects, collaborating across teams, and shipping software more effectively.

Below, we’ll explore seven practical strategies to help you build on your core developer skills.

Final note – a very human closure

You will write code that embarrasses you later. Everyone does. That’s not a bug in your career; it’s the process. Keep the curiosity, keep the stubbornness, and keep the humility. The habits above – fundamentals, reading, problem-solving, version control, and building – compound. Little wins add up. If you want a scaffold while you learn, yes, established programs can help you Excel as a software developer with ServiceNow University (I mentioned it earlier because it’s useful), but they are not magic. The real work is day-to-day: trying, failing, retrying, and slowly getting less scared of code. And – silly but true – coffee helps. Or tea. Or knowing when to step away for an hour and come back calmer. Keep going. One bug at a time.