Tips for a new programmer?

[Sparkyshires]

Comment!!!! What doesn't make a good programmer, at least in my experience, is being able to have complicated algorithm's and methods and classes, but being able to come back to code you wrote at week 1, while you're at the heat of a competition and understand what its doing and fix it. That's the mark of a good program. Comments, nice variable names (not too long, but don't try and shorten them to three letters. leftShooterClutch is better than lsc, for ex.) and encapsulation, so it's easy to see as you start.

tl;dr comments, proper variable names, and encapsulation. Easily the most important aspects of beginning to program.

EDIT: Also, as MrRoboSteve mentioned, Github gives a free bronze account to any FRC team (5 private repos(?)). I would set that up now. So insanely useful, although a bit of a learning curve to get used to github. But version control is absolutely necessary also.