Or: some observations after teaching some green devs.

Pretty much regardless of where you are in your programming journey, you will be learning things -- I think that's much of the appeal -- but I want to think here about the things that you're learning early on. I refer to these as "mechanics" because the aren't really what we think of as programming, they don't do anything cool and they don't add features. They're bookkeeping.

• Indenting -- Its not there as some annoying chore. Its there to make the logic of the code that you've written clear both to yourself and to anyone else looking at your code. Hopefully you're using an editor that can do this for you.

• Naming -- This problem never really goes away, but make them clear, make them consistent and make them more than one letter.

• Planning -- This definitely never goes away, but start early. Where maybe later on we spend more time making bigger, architecture style planning decisions, early on spend your time writing down what functions you will need to write. Work out what your common chunks of logic that deserve their own function and work out what things need to trigger which other things. Draw a diagram, a flow chart, whatever helps.

• Version Control -- Another thing that you should start using early. This one is not super relevant to my idea of "mechanics", but it will save you one day. Make sure you don't have a "if only I had used git" story, but rather a "thank goodness I was using git, and you should too" story.

• Googling -- Got an error message? Awesome! That's the best thing a computer can do to tell you exactly what to do. What its saying is "fix this thing, if you don't know anything about it, then the internet will". Search and search well.'