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Ask HN: Working alone, how do you improve your coding skills?

9 points by ed209 ↗ HN
I recently release my first bit of open source code. Nothing major, a jQuery gallery plugin. The problem is I have no idea how "good" it is in code terms.

I'm not a developer by trade (didn't study cs) but I enjoy coding. Are there any mentoring programmes or code review sites? How do you asses how good your coding is if you're not working with peers?

8 comments

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TomSawyer
Don't let asses assess your code. It'll only bring you down.
staunch
Reading high quality code helps a ton. See how great programmers write code in the languages they're experts in. You can bet any Javascript written by John Resig is going to be high quality. Learn why he writes code the way he does.

There are style and "best practices" guides for many languages. Python has PEP-8. Perl has the "Perl Best Practices" and "Modern Perl" books. Javascript has "Javascript: The Good Parts". Go has "Effective Go".

ed209
How do you find out which are the great programmers? I'll look up John Resig, thanks.
staunch
John Resig created jQuery. Language/framework creators are usually a good start. Any core contributor to jQuery or Rails is probably a competent Javascript or Ruby programmer.
shinryuu
One idea could be to start contribute to open source. Mozilla for example. Along with the coding you do you could presumably ask other programmers working on it to assess your code.
ed209
That's partly why I release an open source plugin for jQuery, hoping others might pick it up and suggest improvements.
forgottenpaswrd
I have experience working with peers and working alone.

Normally I write better code when I am alone, or when my peers are exceptionally talented.

People believe they can change the environment, they can't. If you start working with people that are not motivated, you become unmotivated.

If you start working with messy programmers that create imperfect code with lots of bugs you will become the slave that spends 95% of their time fixing other people's bugs instead of creating new code, or you will just choose over time to program equally messy code.

Steve Jobs had this rule, based on experience making software: "everything new you create, you do with an extremely small team of star programmers". E.g the initial iOS team was over 20 people.

zachlatta
I recommend submitting pull requests to open source projects. You'll often get recommendations from the open source maintainers that'll help you get a sense of where you are coding-wise. It'll also be a chance to do something good.