Ask HN: How to learn best practices when you have no one to teach you? • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by behringer » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 3:53 AM UTC

LandR wrote: post #143

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #133

Conference Youtube videos. They are a goldmine of useful tips and tricks. Go look for videos from the Node [1] and MongoDB [2] conferences and you will find tons of war stories and what is actually working for people. Using this option arguably connects you directly with some of the best people in the world who are actually using this stuff. ps. using the youtube 2x playback speed option can really help digest lots o…

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…

It's true. The best way to learn is to do. Second best, look at production quality source code. Third best, buy a book written by an actual authority on the topic.

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

#162

Post by askmike » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 3:58 AM UTC

LandR wrote: post #143

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #133

Conference Youtube videos. They are a goldmine of useful tips and tricks. Go look for videos from the Node [1] and MongoDB [2] conferences and you will find tons of war stories and what is actually working for people. Using this option arguably connects you directly with some of the best people in the world who are actually using this stuff. ps. using the youtube 2x playback speed option can really help digest lots o…

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…

The blind leading the blind? Most conferences have lineups of well respected people involved in an ecosystem. From language authors to open source maintainers and such.

It seems you don't seem to understand the purpose of conferences and blogs. These talks are not to showcase the best quality production code that can pass any review process. They are to showcase new developments and new approaches to do things in a specific field. It's meant for people already in the field (or starting to get into it) trying to learn more.

If such talks have high quality production code in slides the message would get easily buried under stuff that isn't important for conveying the message they are trying to say.

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

#163

Post by zamalek » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 4:17 AM UTC

barbs wrote: post #55

In general I think it's good to be in touch with communities centred around your language and framework to get a good idea of how people are solving similar problems to yours. Things change so much over the years and there are multiple ways to solve the same problems that you won't get from just reading official documentation. Once you get a sense of the general playing field you can deep dive into certain topics. I…

> No idea what the equivalents would be for Node + Express and MongoDB but I'm sure they exist :).

GitHub, up for grabs issues. If you really want to learn, stick with the more popular proects, as they usually have more experienced developers involved.

The problem with this is that you need to work after-hours, which is not everyone's cup of tea.

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

#164

Post by thoman23 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 4:54 AM UTC

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #133

Conference Youtube videos. They are a goldmine of useful tips and tricks. Go look for videos from the Node [1] and MongoDB [2] conferences and you will find tons of war stories and what is actually working for people. Using this option arguably connects you directly with some of the best people in the world who are actually using this stuff. ps. using the youtube 2x playback speed option can really help digest lots o…

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who watches YouTube presentations on 1.5-2x speed. I mentioned that at work once and people looked at me like I was crazy.

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

#165

Post by shemtovo » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 4:59 AM UTC

thoman23 wrote: post #164

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #133

Conference Youtube videos. They are a goldmine of useful tips and tricks. Go look for videos from the Node [1] and MongoDB [2] conferences and you will find tons of war stories and what is actually working for people. Using this option arguably connects you directly with some of the best people in the world who are actually using this stuff. ps. using the youtube 2x playback speed option can really help digest lots o…

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who watches YouTube presentations on 1.5-2x speed. I mentioned that at work once and people looked at me like I was crazy.

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

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

#166

Post by austhrow743 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:05 AM UTC

"when you have no one to teach you?"

Isn't this likely to change for you one way or the other reasonably quickly given that you're at the earliest (most volatile) stage of a startup? Unless you drag things out longer than they need to in denial of failure, you're going to either be building a team or joining one shortly enough.

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

#167

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:17 AM UTC

shemtovo wrote: post #165

thoman23 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who watches YouTube presentations on 1.5-2x speed. I mentioned that at work once and people looked at me like I was crazy.

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

[deleted]

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

#168

Post by danite » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:18 AM UTC

Gibbon1 wrote: post #122

iheartpotatoes wrote: post #90

"Best practices" is a bit of a red herring. Every company differs considerably, and online blogospher experts throw the term around as sort of a gatekeep-y way to keep the order ("What do you mean you don't know (arbitrary) best practices??!?!") The only way to learn best practices is to work at multiple companies / projects. For example, I worked at Intel, Lucent, Apple and DEC. Each one had significantly different…

I'll second that a lot of 'best practices' is cargo cult like gate keeping. Just learn how to write idiomatic code in whatever language / framework you are using. At least the approaches are good enough. And other OCD/Autistic programmers won't lose their shit when they see it. Do try to write code in an active AKA explicit way. Whne you read the code it should be obvious what it's trying to do. Code where the right…

Please don't use autistic or OCD as slurs.

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

#169

Post by wizardofmysore » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:18 AM UTC

LandR wrote: post #143

WestCoastJustin wrote: post #133

Conference Youtube videos. They are a goldmine of useful tips and tricks. Go look for videos from the Node [1] and MongoDB [2] conferences and you will find tons of war stories and what is actually working for people. Using this option arguably connects you directly with some of the best people in the world who are actually using this stuff. ps. using the youtube 2x playback speed option can really help digest lots o…

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…

It depends on which conference you are looking at, if Brian Goetz had a talk on concurrency best practices then it would definitely be something to think about.

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

#170

Post by waterhouse » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:35 AM UTC

shemtovo wrote: post #165

thoman23 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who watches YouTube presentations on 1.5-2x speed. I mentioned that at work once and people looked at me like I was crazy.

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

Highly recommended: Video Speed Controller.

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