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

Effortless Mastery, by Kenny Werner. The Music Lesson, by Victor Wooten. Both of these are about music, but are really about mastery.

Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew B. Crawford. This is a much more philosophical/academic argument that skilled manual labor is both intellectually and morally superior to most office work - you're shaping reality, rather than shaping yourself. I happily lump the craft of software development in with physical labor here, though, as it faces the same kinds of reality-based limitations.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki. Transcribed lectures by a well-known Zen monk. The entire book is basically about learning how to sit still. If you can't even sit still, how do you expect to do anything else well? And do you have any idea what it even means to just sit still?

- online curses

- hours of youtube conferences

Sometimes learn is impossible at work, or...

i had and experience... i was working for a bizarre company, the culture was very far from what i could consider decent, in some cases they were toxic. Nobody could understand what i was trying to say/do. MSSQL, C# and other very cool stuff.

But wait... they weren't able to understand what i was doing but... i was able to understand what their business was, their special use-cases, their customers and requirements.

Those moment are in the past now. But i learned a lot from people that could not understand me, having a completely different background.

Everybody can teach us something...

I don't think this will help tremendously, but don't feel frightened if there is nobody to mentor or push you. When I started fresh from college (although that is some kind of experience), I found myself in a small start-up with 4 people, one of which was my good friend, but we were not leaders, just executors. The owner was the business guy, with little technical knowledge. Nevertheless, we pushed on hard. Learned ourselves (each of us four had little overlap, we interfaced). And you know what, although I felt lost and disoriented, I learned a lot, in perspective. Partially because I was inexperienced, but everything we did was quality, I must say.

Some years after I got into a company where everyone was much more experienced, and with mentors and all that. You know what? I become a mentor to most of them in a matter of months... Don't know how it happened, but it turned out that I've proven more agile.

Now I'm in a much more experienced and serious company, and now I do have seniors than myself. That helps a bit by helping me differentiate valuable from invaluable knowledge. But again, if you don't push yourself, no body will instead of you.

I'm not that experienced, it was only 6 years since I graduated.

This approach is definitely up for debate but I stay abreast of emerging "best practices" by reading the blogs of the tools I use. I'm a software tester interested in project management and find myself reading Atlassian's QA blog quite a bit.

Wait until the next engineer, however experienced, inherits your code and he will tell you everything you did wrong.