How a freelancer can learn industry standards?

Question

Being a freelancer, I don't have access to corporate training programs where employees learn best practices. Most of the time I am advised to look into the available code on the Internet. Ideal places would be: CodePlex and SourceForge.

But this proves to be of limited rather very little help. I want my existing code to be analyzed and a better solution be suggested to improve the quality of the code.

How to learn coding that matches standards?

Answer 1

The ideal solution is near you. There is a website called stackoverflow.com where thousand of fanatic developers are answering questions for free. Just for what is called reputation points. That website is full of extremely experienced professionnals and it's not very common to meet people like Jon Skeet the author of C# In Depth.

Your strategy? Try to answer to questions you know the answer, but also consult questions you may be interested in, such as the ones that talk about industry standards.

It is becoming so huge, that now I skip google, and search directly on stackoverflow.com.

Answer 2

If you are doing development in .NET you can get inexpensive or free static analysis of your code with a tool like FxCop (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=917023f6-d5b7-41bb-bbc0-411a7d66cf3c&displaylang=en). This does not cover best practices for the PROCESS of creating software but it does cover a lot of things that tend to wind up in best practices documents.

You did say "I want my existing code to be analyzed and a better solution be suggested to improve the quality of the code." so I think that FxCop would be a good place to start IF you are doing .NET development. I would imagine that there are similar static analysis tools for Java or other environments.

Good luck!

Answer 3

For C# code as well as FxCop (as mentioned by Todd) there's StyleCop.

StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules. It can be run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild project.

It checks for different, complementary, things and can be useful.

Though, as for FxCop, don't run all your code through it in one go. The "errors" will overwhelm you.

Answer 4

Check out the relevant open-source projects in your programming language of choice and domain in places like github, sf.net etc

Actively participate in working with other developers in open-source, subscribe yourself to mailing lists, read the latest ideas in IBM Developeworks, ACM Queue and Dr Dobbs... Best of luck!