What advice will you give to developers who are just starting their careers?

It will be easy to be reminded you have a lot to learn, but don’t forget you’re often at your creative highest when you start out because you’re not limited by what you know. Use that to your advantage by being bold to try new things.

• Don't be afraid to ask for help when you're stuck
• You can't learn everything, so focus on the things that matter
• Be active in the communities (open source projects, local meetups)
• Keep the work-life balance. Working too much leads to the burnout

The goal isn’t to be a rockstar developer, it’s to provide business value in a maintainable way. That includes using dependable languages and frameworks, writing maintainable code, forging good relationships in your team (and beyond that), keeping a work/life balance, ... It’s fine using fancy new frameworks or cutting edge libraries if the situation allows it, but be aware of the costs/benefits ratio when you do that.

• Never stop learning! This must be a constant in your life, so set apart some time in your week to learn something new.
• Don't try to learn everything, focus on specific topics.
• Build things. This will help you understand the mechanics and apply all the theory you've learnt.
• You are a human, not a machine: resting, sleeping, eating and excercise are important.
• Ask for help if you get stuck.

Never type the command "sudo rm -rf /*"

The most important skill you can develop is your ability to learn, our field is always moving in an ever increasing pace; is not how much you know but how quickly you can adapt and learn.

Also don't forget that a good deal of our profession is dealing with people from peers, customers and managers. There is always a human being on the other side, if you are a developer in the service industry, think from the clients perspective; if you are giving feedback or doing code reviews take the person into the other side in consideration.

Above all keep a healthy level of humility.

Change career.

Just joking. Well, not completely. But to withstand in this area, there are many things you have to remember, or they can really hurt your mind and soul.

• Ignore jerks. There are MILLIONS in development world.

• Find something that you think it is fun. Don't just work in anything programming-related, just because. (My case: it was the web)

• Don't try to take it all at the same time. Start as small as possible. Even if feel the community pressures you to do otherwise. (My case: Just HTML and CSS)

• Even when you decide to move forward, don't dismiss completely the things that made you happy. You may need them. (My case: I miss the time when all my work was just doing Wordpress themes. Now I have to deal with so many options, and people defending things I find unnecessary in my life)

I think the only things I have to add is that while the tools, languages, and frameworks can change over the years, in essence programming is about problem solving and also thinking about things logically so developing these skills will serve you well throughout your career.

Also I with time you will realize that many languages are similar to each other. For example there are many c-flavored languages (C++, PHP, JavaScript etc), and once you know how to program in one, much of that knowledge (conditionals, loops, function etc) is transferable to other languages.

Finally having a good grasp of Object Orientated concepts and a few design patterns will be helpful as again these skills will transfer to whatever languages you use over the years.

Hello Ashish,

In such cases i would reccomend that they start learning a rather restrictive programming language, like C++, and then move to other more relaxed programming or scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Python, JavaScript, etc.). Once you are familiar and used to some common sense restrictions that, in strict languages, make your application crash, when you'll transition to other relaxed languages you'll have less chances of creating bugs in your code. On top of that, like Douglas McKechie wrote below, many other languages are C-like, so learning this will make it even easier to transition to others.

Don't hesitate to say that you don't know something.
Really, it can't be a BIG problem if you lie, and you don't look idiot at all not knowing what xquery on XML is.