Hi. I am in the same boat as you. I have been developing different kinds of software for almost 20 years but only recently got interested in electronics and spe

Hi. I am in the same boat as you. I have been developing different kinds of software for almost 20 years but only recently got interested in electronics and specifically electronics design. Being noob myself I can't give you too many tips and tell in honesty they come from deep experience. But I can give you one. Don't be bent on doing everything yourself. Working with and understanding existing circuits is a huge opportunity to learn a lot from people who have infinitely more experience at this than you. I have discovered this when I determined to fix couple of broken devices at home. Each time, by analyzing the existing circuit, I have learned a lot about how people put things together and how features of the device can realistically look. With the benefit of hindsight, this should have been obvious. I am not spending too much time to read other peoples' codebases to learn from them but that's because I have started learning programming some 25 years ago and by now I can solve problems for myself. But when I started out I would take every opportunity to look at some foreign code, copy it, understand how it works and I understand this has been great learning tool. Now that I have kids (older son is 7yo) I use the same technique to teach him programming. Instead of going from first principles I show him a working program (in scratch), or somebody else creating a working program or we create a working program with me programming it, and he learns much faster how to program by seeing how something works rather than by trying to derive from first principles.