The IT world has been beckoning you for a long time, but you’re a little scared to try a new field? Or are you already on the path of IT and are taking the first difficult steps?

Tip 1: Ask!
Perhaps the first and very obvious tip is not to be afraid to ask. Asking questions is an important skill, one of the most useful in the future, in my opinion. By the way, you can ask not only your direct project/activity partners, but also colleagues from related fields: testers, managers, analysts. Sometimes accidentally gained knowledge is the key to understanding more serious problems. Besides, human experience is the most valuable thing, many things cannot be learned from books. With time, an understanding of this comes.

Tip 2: Write it down!
Have a thought about what you can do in a project? Save it. An idea comes to mind about how you can improve your skills? Write it down. Then you can revisit those notes and learn something important, or maybe realize that you’ve already accomplished something. In moments of crisis, such “saved notes” help you remember why you chose what you do in the first place.

Tip 3: Get inspired!
Another thing: find non-financial motivation. When a person decides to “get into it” for the sake of relatively high salaries, with no interest in the field as such, it is very noticeable. There is nothing wrong with the financial component, but it shouldn’t be the only driving factor. If your eyes aren’t on fire, no amount of zeros in your workbook can light them up.

Tip 4: Play!
It’s useful to turn everything into a game, not without reason gamification is one of the best training techniques. Let the skills become achivkas, the complexity of projects – levels, and the difficulties along the way – the dragons that must be defeated. A banal human excitement works here, and with such an approach, even seemingly boring things become much more fun and exciting.

Tip 5: Tell the story!
It’s also good practice to tell others about what you’re doing and teaching. To whom – it doesn’t matter so much: it can be a younger brother or sister, parents who are interested in what you’re doing there, non-IT friends, or maybe another intern or newbie. You have to try to convey the information as accurately as possible, but just so that a person with no experience roughly understands what you’re talking about. There’s a saying: he who thinks clearly, writes clearly. But it works in the other direction: having learned to make clear, people structure knowledge in his head, and it helps him understand the subject better.

Tip 6: Read!
It’s thanks to literature that I developed my first skills. At first it will be difficult even with the basic stuff, but don’t give up. When such moments happened, I outlined incomprehensible chapters in a notebook and repeated them to myself from memory. It is necessary to give my brain time to process an array of new and complicated information. After some time, everything will fit and assimilate itself, and the main thing is not to get discouraged.

A separate sub-item is documentation in the original: the original mode is preferable – and the loss of information is less, and the pumping of the language is stronger.

Tip 7: Have a good rest!
Most times when you come home after work you want to relax, to lie on the couch, to watch YouTube, to read something before going to bed… Rest Wisely! Lying on the couch, sort out issues on GitHub, prefer a new episode of the show to a useful presentation by a colleague, instead of counting sheep click in your mind algorithmic problems – all this quietly trains your brain, increases the knowledge base, and you don’t even notice how you get pumped up!

Tip 8: Go for it!
It will most likely take time and more than one attempt to get your first offer. I got my first job after 7 unsuccessful attempts, but there could be many more, it means absolutely nothing. The main thing is to always keep in your head that someday this very interview will happen.

Tip 9: Listen wisely!
I would advise filtering information and having an opinion, while remaining flexible. Knowing how to work with information means a lot at first: there is a lot of information, different sources, conflicting opinions… And until you fully understand the fundamental things, it seems that everything is essential; until you have tried a myriad of technologies and written bikes, the level of other developers seems unrealistically cool. This is normal, it passes. It is important to be critical of information, to consider the problem from different perspectives, and to take as a reference point the position of more experienced comrades who have already proven their credibility in practice. It’s not a technical skill at all, but a surprisingly important one in development.

Tip 10: Learn the basics!
I would also advise you to study fundamental theory from books, and to watch reports on modern trends. It seems that such fundamental knowledge is not particularly important for solving practical problems, but as a rule, those who have studied enough, produce much better solutions to working problems.

Tip 11: Learn the basics!
Give yourself a basic computer literacy course. Familiarize yourself with the computer structure and how it works. Make sure you understand the principles of the operating system. Make friends with algorithms. Do the academic basics: OOP, functional programming, algorithmic complexity, etc.

Tip 12: Get pumped!
Never stop learning. The life of a programmer is like the life of a scientist: you have to learn new things all the time, otherwise you will be out of circulation. Try not only to read, but also to practice new skills and knowledge. Courses are a great way to learn a new technology with the help of small articles and practical tasks. From here on it is only practice and striving for perfection.

Tip 13: Communicate!
Learning to break down tasks into simple components is a skill that allows you to solve any complex task, even if it seems impossible at first glance.

An effective junior is as communicative as possible, because he or she needs to consult with the teamleader all the time. But first, the junior analyzes the problem himself, breaks it down into parts, comes up with several solutions, thinks, and googles what he doesn’t understand. And then he goes to the team leader and asks questions about whether he’s offering the right solution, so that the jung himself, not the team leader, solves it for the jung. Then comes the reporting period, when the Timlid checks the Jun’s work and sees how the work is going.