
Ask HN: How can I continue learning as a solo, remote freelancer? - danthareja
Three years ago, I quit my full-time job as a web developer for a startup in SF to try the remote&#x2F;DN thing. Since then, most of my work up has been either completely solo, or on a small team where I&#x27;m the only&#x2F;most experienced developer.<p>I feel like my development skills are plateauing, and I don&#x27;t know what to do. It makes sense though, I am hired as a freelancer for the skills I already have, not my potential for learning on the job.<p>One of the things I miss the most from my in-person job is the mentorship from senior developers. I miss being able to ask a quick question, or have them code review my work. Without this guidance, I often feel lonely since it&#x27;s just me and the internet vs the problem.<p>My current method to continue learning is to read blogs, read weekly newsletters, and work through online courses. The challenge here is that it&#x27;s still entirely up to me to interpret and adapt the lessons into my own work. I don&#x27;t have anyone to discuss the learning points with and verify that I understand the lesson correctly.<p>Do you have any advice on how I can find mentorship as a solo, remote freelancer?
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kugelblitz
Yeah, I've been pondering that as well for a while. The biggest boost in
learning I've had is:

* Doing a small side-project that you follow through on. Just doing a little bit each day. I've done PHP (Laravel / Symfony) and JavaScript (jQuery, now mostly Vue.js) for most of my "career". Now I'm doing side-projects in Python (I try to use Flask or Django). Actually, I'm just writing up an article on how I want to focus on "boring" tech, because I don't want to learn a new technology on the side that gets obsolete 2 years later (I'm looking at you, AngularJS 1 & bower & grunt & gulp).

* Get on board with a team where many of them are senior developers. I've been in projects where I was silo-ed off and worked on a specific feature - Boost Level 4 / 10 (because I get to dig deeper into specific areas, if I so choose). In projects where I was the most senior developer because the company focused on only hiring junior developers and doing scrum / agile - Boost Level 3 / 10 (we were discussing so much, so actual development time was little). Team of senior developers each with their specific skill set working on an MVP deliverable within 2 months and you only know 60% of the technologies used - Boost Level 8 / 10.

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ahartmetz
FOSS contributions. You won't get formal mentoring, but a quality codebase and
the occasional discussion of a thorny technical topic will be very helpful.
There are some really good programmers in most projects.

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danthareja
This is a good idea! Do you know any projects that are particularly
helpful/supportive in the JS community?

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ahartmetz
Unfortunately no, I do mainly C++.

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danthareja
No worries, thanks for the suggestion!

