Some things i have realized along the way.

1) Don't try to solve everything on your own and ask for help. There are a lot of tasks which take significantly less time with some help. If you are just starting out and feel a little bit that you ask to much... don't worry a time will come when people are asking you for help. And than you can give back.

2) Be nice and friendly to people and build good relationships. It has saved my butt more than once that i was on good terms with some database or ops people. But you have to be genuine. Faking it doesn't work.

3) Realize that text is your raw material as wood is the raw material for a carpenter. Learn to manipulate text and text files well.

4) Learn a language to do automation and text processing(-> Point 3)).

5) Sometimes it can be easier to learn a new tool than to do a task with your existing tool. But you might hesitate.

6) Try to automate earlier than later. You will save time and get coding practise in. (-> Point 4)

7) Get comfortable with a shell and than customize the heck out of it. It will be very helpful with points 3, 4 and 6. It's very good way to build small tools which will be a great help

8) Try to automate as much steps out of your your documentation as possible. You will get coding practise in and those scripts will also be a form of documentation, where you will know immediatly if something is not correct.

9) Working with unittests is like climbing with a rope and safty hooks. If you have a good test coverage and f something up you will fall but just into you last hook. As the tests catch the error you have introduced. Also if something is hard to test and not an edge case, chances are the design is not the greatest. Plus you get in coding and refactoring practise.

10)Take breaks and recharge. You are human.

11) Also work on your soft- and communication skills. Software Development is usually a team sport.

12) Write Stuff down You will have to remember a lot of knowledge and you are human and will forget things. Try to keep a daily logbook.

13) Use Password Manager to store your login data