Ask HN: How to learn best practices when you have no one to teach you?

"Best practices" are not the best way to think about your output nor your (personal) development.

The term is flawed to start with in the sense that it invites you to think of practices as fixed or objective rather than contextual.

You should think of your development as striving to amass the experience/wisdom to recognize the practices that are likely to work better in each situation on the fly. And that just comes with hours and hours and hours of trying different stuff and seeing for yourself (consciously) what you like best and what works best and when. It's slower, but finding that stuff out through experience is really the only true way to learn. Knowledge is a commodity, wisdom is what matters.

And there's a lot more subjectivity to it than we normally treat it as. A given practice can be better along dimension X. But two (great) developers can disagree about whether X is the dimension to optimize vs. Y.

If what you need is a specific practice that is working for people in one specific context at one specific time, you can search the web. But even then, it's not a black and white "best" thing and without your own instinct to judge what you're reading or being told by someone, you're making at some level a guess.

repeat for new languages

Hopefully. A friend of mine once said "So do you have ten years of experience, or do you have one year of experience ten times?"

Hi

I'd like to give a contrasting answer, which is that you should go somewhere where you can be mentored and learn. If you're concerned about your ability to continue learning best practices and level up as an engineer, you should keep in mind that there are many engineering organizations where you'll be able to work directly with engineers much more senior than you who you'll learn a lot from -- in my prior experience, it was this kind of collaboration that I learned the most from. It's true that I learned a lot when I was younger from self-teaching and experience, but there was a certain amount that I'm not sure I could have (or should ever have) picked up on the job in production, because it would have been infinitely more painful and less productive than collaborating with someone who could help guide me in the right direction, as well as whom I could look up to as a mentor and a guide.

If you want that (which is reasonable because it's an excellent almost invaluable resource for your career), you have to first find an organization that provides that. Where you're at may or may not be that place.