
Ask HN: How to become a better coder without guidance from my company? - cebeve
I graduated a year ago and have been working in consulting as a full stack dev since. On many projects I found myself to be the only developer, architect and sys admin. It’s been a decent learning opportunity but the long hours and high degree of responsibility almost made me burnout.<p>I’ve been trying to jump ship to a tech company, where I hope I can learn from more experienced developers and be in a better work environment. This task has been tremendously hard.<p>Specifically, companies have told me that my code does not follow best coding practices or, more in general, that I’m not knowledgeable enough. I’ve hit a wall since I feel I can’t just learn “best practices“ on my own. From what I’m reading, best practices vary a lot between companies, teams and industries. Am I supposed to just start reading Code Complete, Elements of Programming Style and O’Reilly Books?<p>As a newcomer to the industry this is incredibly discouraging. Does anyone have any good advice for someone in my position?
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hans1729
Write less code, and read more (code by others) instead.

Learn different languages (especially functional ones, I can recommend
Elixir). It'll inspire you to see different paradigms.

Think about well defined functions, modularity, simplicity. Check out the zen
of python. Watch talks by Rich Hickey and other knowledgable+smart people.

Look at well-regarded code-bases, try to understand why others write things
the way they do. Chromium is widely considered an amazing piece of code.

Post your code online and ask for advice. When you're told off because your
code doesn't follow best practices, ask which best practices are meant, and
start following them once you understood the reasoning behind them. [...]

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streetcat1
So, you might want to look at the open source projects from the said tech
companies and adopt your coding habits to their style.

Also, you may ask for code review at your current place.

I would actually say that you should write as much code as possible. I would
also try to automate your sys admin work with infra-as-code tools like
terraform or kuberentes.

The key to becoming better developer is to practice as much as you can. You
should not look at the long hours as a chore but as opportunity to code more.

