You can buy Clean Code and it's not going to hurt, but I increasingly believe the only way to "step up" is to write code, lots of it. Things like Clean Code ar

You can buy Clean Code and it's not going to hurt, but I increasingly believe the only way to "step up" is to write code, lots of it. Things like Clean Code are a bit too dogmatic for my tastes now, there are some reasonable ideas there but it's tempting to apply them where they don't fit. What helped me was starting my own large project [0] based off porting another codebase. I started with wanting to follow Clean Code practices to the letter but now, 2/3 years later and with the benefit of hindsight I'm increasingly moving away from a lot of the Clean Code 'rules' (short methods, etc). But I also write other short lived projects which allow me to try different things out and learn from my mistakes. When you think how we learn as children a lot is based on making mistakes and I think that is what's missing from a lot of how programming is taught. [0]: https://github.com/UglyToad/PdfPig https://github.com/UglyToad/PdfPig