Wow, great advice in here, good job HN! I'm an ME but have been mostly doing SW for a very long time. What I remember helping, in addition to the advice here:

Wow, great advice in here, good job HN! I'm an ME but have been mostly doing SW for a very long time. What I remember helping, in addition to the advice here: 1) Start small, don't dive into a complex project right away but instead find the interesting parts of the project where your domain knowledge is useful. Rely on seasoned SW folks to maintain the framework and then slowly learn inside out. 2) Use the debugger! In addition to reading the code and any documentation on the architecture the debugger can help reveal the often crazy runtime behavior. At first just step through your code and watch what happens, then look at the call stack and, if applicable, threads or other concurrent stuff going on.