21–30 of 209 posts
In most cases, the leverage you'll get from this, compared to trying to learn everything yourself, tends to be overwhelmingly greater than the cost of searching.
If there is no one to answer your questions in your company - try and find some buddies on the internets or even change company, as in my experience, ability to ask stupid questions and get answers quick is crucial in learning programming. StackOverflow is good, but not quick enough.
——-
Ouch, sorry, misunderstood your question. I am not sure there is a book on best practices on APIs, but it’s definitly possible to have someone experienced help you as a company. There are good developers with experience doing this type of contractor work.
——
If not, it pains me to know that there still isn’t an answer besides, “quit and be skilled enough at determining that a company is good at teaching best practices.”
> books
Are a way to absorb information that the author thought a broad audience would want to know and be able to digest. They don’t replace being able to get detailed individual feedback on your work and your particular questions.
> make mistakes
In my experience, mistakes have one big flaw: They don’t teach you a way to do something correctly. It is possible to go into a situation thinking, “I don’t know what to do here and I need help.” And to come out of the situation saying, “Yep, I did my best and I failed in pretty much the way I thought I would. New information learned: none.” Ideally, you would be able to shop for or come up with a workable solution yourself. In reality, humans benefit greatly by learning from the past solutions of others and from getting personal recommendations.
It's less that you'll learn best practices, but you will expose yourself to the zeitgeist, which I feel is important to being a good dev. Again, not to blindly follow it or even agree with it, but to understand it and why it's pushing in one direction or another.
If you work with people who are already experts, they will always prevent you from making mistakes. Being able to actually make those mistakes gives you a much better understanding of why people do things though.