

Ask HN: Working alone, how do you improve your coding skills? - ed209

I recently release my first bit of open source code. Nothing major, a jQuery gallery plugin. The problem is I have no idea how &quot;good&quot; it is in code terms.<p>I&#x27;m not a developer by trade (didn&#x27;t study cs) but I enjoy coding. Are there any mentoring programmes or code review sites? How do you asses how good your coding is if you&#x27;re not working with peers?
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staunch
Reading high quality code helps a ton. See how great programmers write code in
the languages they're experts in. You can bet any Javascript written by John
Resig is going to be high quality. Learn why he writes code the way he does.

There are style and "best practices" guides for many languages. Python has
PEP-8. Perl has the "Perl Best Practices" and "Modern Perl" books. Javascript
has "Javascript: The Good Parts". Go has "Effective Go".

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ed209
How do you find out which are the great programmers? I'll look up John Resig,
thanks.

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staunch
John Resig created jQuery. Language/framework creators are usually a good
start. Any core contributor to jQuery or Rails is probably a competent
Javascript or Ruby programmer.

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forgottenpaswrd
I have experience working with peers and working alone.

Normally I write better code when I am alone, or when my peers are
exceptionally talented.

People believe they can change the environment, they can't. If you start
working with people that are not motivated, you become unmotivated.

If you start working with messy programmers that create imperfect code with
lots of bugs you will become the slave that spends 95% of their time fixing
other people's bugs instead of creating new code, or you will just choose over
time to program equally messy code.

Steve Jobs had this rule, based on experience making software: "everything new
you create, you do with an extremely small team of star programmers". E.g the
initial iOS team was over 20 people.

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TomSawyer
Don't let asses assess your code. It'll only bring you down.

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shinryuu
One idea could be to start contribute to open source. Mozilla for example.
Along with the coding you do you could presumably ask other programmers
working on it to assess your code.

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ed209
That's partly why I release an open source plugin for jQuery, hoping others
might pick it up and suggest improvements.

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zachlatta
I recommend submitting pull requests to open source projects. You'll often get
recommendations from the open source maintainers that'll help you get a sense
of where you are coding-wise. It'll also be a chance to do something good.

