I am currently working for a startup and am one of 3 developers. Most of my work revolves around building the API in Node + Express as well as some small projects with MongoDB. The other developers don't really assist me since they have their own projects to work on, and, honestly, they have less experience and knowledge than I do.
So my question is: What is the best way for me to go about learning best practices in API development, or using MongoDB, or even just being a better software developer in general?
There are a lot of famous books on the subject of best practices: "Code Complete" and "Clean Code" are the first to come to mind, but I'm sure the folks here can recommend others.
1. Make lots of mistakes. 2. Experience pain in the form of late, buggy software and angry clients. 3. Read books and work on side projects. (Martin Fowler’s were my favorite). 4. Repeat for 5-10 years with hopefully ever-decreasing amounts of 1 and 2. You probably think I'm kidding...
There's no substitute for direct experience.
You can rattle off quotes and documents all day, but this doesn't teach 1% as much as the direct pain of dealing with st on the job.
1. Make lots of mistakes. 2. Experience pain in the form of late, buggy software and angry clients. 3. Read books and work on side projects. (Martin Fowler’s were my favorite). 4. Repeat for 5-10 years with hopefully ever-decreasing amounts of 1 and 2. You probably think I'm kidding...
1. Make lots of mistakes. 2. Experience pain in the form of late, buggy software and angry clients. 3. Read books and work on side projects. (Martin Fowler’s were my favorite). 4. Repeat for 5-10 years with hopefully ever-decreasing amounts of 1 and 2. You probably think I'm kidding...
In one sentence (by C.S. Lewis ):
“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”
You can always find people to help you. I'm not a node + express specialist but I do a fair share of JS, you can contact me at localhostdotdev@protonmail.com if you want.
Blog posts other developers make detailing the way they've built a particular project have helped me gain some perspective when looking to understand how people are working in a particular stack. Learning from other projects is good for understanding how people are using contemporary tools. Github is also a great source for this, you can search with those tags to find relevant projects. As for software engineering in general, there is more academic materials which cover various methodologies ( you can just search software engineering and find many resources ). There are so many resources out there; I don't personally have a systematic way of navigating it. Once I find a good resource, I tend to look at what else the author has done and who else is connected to that author and then I walk around what that social circle's body of work, picking up various things. Finding the sages in a particular area, finding out who really knows about the area I'm studying at the moment, then learning from them... all starting from Google searches and some sleuthing.