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

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

#171

Post by dang »

bigums wrote: post #158
LandR wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say do not look to conference videos for how to write production quality code... Most talks at conferences are shallow and at worst just the blind leading the blind. Be very careful, I've even seen people from places like Microsoft showing code at conferences that would fail even a decent code review process. I think for this reason conferences are a complete waste of time. Talks are too short to go into anyt…

You must be fun at parties.

No personal attacks, please, regardless of how wrong or annoying another comment is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#173

Post by sbr464 »

waterhouse wrote: post #170
shemtovo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not crazy at all. Problem is YouTube only goes to 2x

Highly recommended: Video Speed Controller. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/ Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

Thx for sharing.

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

#174

Post by sbr464 »

One method I’ve found, although slightly obscure and more frontend related:

1. Visit a complex web app, check if source maps are enabled.

2. Using Chrome DevTools, download the sources and source maps.

3. Install shuji, https://github.com/paazmaya/shuji

4. Run shuji recursively on the source maps to output normal code.

5. Review Components/code to see how current companies are carrying out (best) practices, etc.

For me, it helped break down how different companies (with closed source) are structuring React/Redux code for complex apps.

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

#177

Post by afarrell »

opportune wrote: post #135

I did a quick control-f "read" and almost everyone is telling you to read books or articles about best practices. That might be useful once as a highlevel overview when getting started on a topic, but my personal advice is to only do that briefly. You'll get the most bang for your buck READING CODE. There is no better way to improve as a developer than reading good code. Reading articles and books will teach you thin…

How do you learn to read code without guidance and without getting lost? How do you keep your thoughts organized? At each step, how do you confidently decide where to go next?

———

I’d like you to take as given that I’m reasonably intelligent — I graduated from MIT and have been working as a software engineer for 6 years. Yet when I sit down to read https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress or https://github.com/webpack/webpack, I don’t know where to start or how to incrementally build up an understanding.

How can I learn how to read a project’s worth of code?

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

#178

Post by afarrell »

meuk wrote: post #35

Just my two cents: learning by "experience" works, but is extremely inefficient, and you don't always get the feedback of your work. You always learn by experience, but you do as much as you can to learn to avoid making mistakes in practice. Compare it to learning to drive: Yes, you learn driving by experience, but you still need driving lessons to avoid getting in accidents. You can try to learn on your own by readi…

This is a great metaphor.

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

#180

Post by sjellis »

allan_s wrote: post #126

I would like to point out a possible problem with the generic advice "read books" "follow blogs etc." => technological bias As you are from Node/Express and Mongodb background the biggest risk is trying to become only better in these technologies. So you will only know how to make faster horses, how to train them for the best, but you will never learn car exists. More than best practices, what makes a great developer…

"As you are from Node/Express and Mongodb background the biggest risk is trying to become only better in these technologies. So you will only know how to make faster horses, how to train them for the best, but you will never learn car exists.

More than best practices, what makes a great developer valuable (especially in a position like you where other people in your company are less experienced than you) is your ability to see wider not deeper."

Yes, you need to balance the need to be proficient with the stack that you have now with the big level-ups that come from learning something quite different. The best way to grow as a developer really is to learn a different programming language, and the thinking that goes with it.

I've never written a line of production code in Clojure, but learning Clojure taught me lessons about immutability and functional thinking that changed the way that that I wrote everything afterwards.

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