Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

Around 5-7 years ago I didn't consider my code exactly high quality, especially when building things from scratch. So I tried to understand what makes good code good, and actually how to spot it. Mostly through reading blog articles, reading actual code and thinking about code. I also got books but only 5 in these years in total. I read only 2 of them through.

So Google is your friend... Have problems with race conditions? There are solutions to that CSP (Golang), Reactor pattern, using 0mq or even STM.

Also don't forget that one things is skill/experience, the other is choosing proper tools. Are you using a simple editor or a heavy-weight IDE? When trying MIDI over Wifi do you Google and try to reproduce the first blog entry you find about. Or do you rather choose high quality components/libraries? # Github stars are a nice indicator for good libs with concise APIs.

But yeah, on the other hand you also need to ask yourself is it worth it? Do you want to be mega focussed and productive? Or do you want to create various things? Being super productive in some place sometimes feels for me a bit Zen-like but on the other hand also a bit boring.

If you're looking at other people's code and finding new insights you can apply to your own work, you're doing it right.

When you look at your old code and wonder:

How did this ever work? What idiot wrote this? WTF was I thinking?!?

You're doing it right. It's a sign of growth and improvement.

Keep in mind also there's a difference between a full stack app and a focused framework. With the end-to-end app, you have to solve many different kinds of problems spanning many domains. Therefore your learning curve to start is going to be a bit higher due simply to there being more ground to cover.

To get better, you need to write more code and to study architecture of other systems. The collection Architecture of Open Source Applications is a good place to start reading.

With all this said, don't beat yourself up too badly. Facebook has been making changes to mercurial version control to make it scale to work for their whole organization. They chose the less popular vcs because the code of git isn't organised very well and it was too difficult for them to extend/modify it.

None of this comes overnight. Many of us start out incredibly messy, and there is nothing wrong with that.

In fact it might give you an edge over folks that start out very elegant and by-the-book because you are used to dealing with things like race conditions and they expect none.

Remember this, the best code is never written the best it can be the first time around, and in a lot of cases never.

Code is a moving target, stay light on you feet, avoid religion of certain methodology ( to an extent ) and paddle towards things that you are proud of.

You will be fine and likely do great if you stick with it.

Finally, there will always, always be someone who knows more to you. There is no end to what you don't know. The sooner you make peace with this the better!