This is a work in progress. If I missed something or someone, please let me know!
It's hard to recommend best practices in general without context, but basically, writing clean, readable code with lots of comments, and doing a lot of automated unit testing, followed by an automated build process using ANT or Grunt to concatenate and minify files is a start.
I don't focus much on blogs any more. I focus more on Twitter. If the people I follow there recommend something, I'll go read it. Here's the best of my Twitter list, including developers, conferences, and interesting groups. There are other great developers on Twitter, but these tweet mostly about development:
- Ben Alman
- Tim Branyen
- Brad Dunbar
- Angelina Fabbro
- Pamela Fox
- Corey Frang
- John Hann
- Ariya Hidayat
- Paul Irish
- Henrik Joreteg
- Rob Larsen
- Jessica Lord
- Mat Marquis
- Garann Means
- Dave Methvin
- Rebecca Murphey
- Max Ogden
- Addy Osmani
- John Paul
- Mike Pennisi
- John Resig
- Irene Ros
- Boaz Sender
- Alex Sexton
- Adam Sontag
- Steve Souders
- Stoyan Stefanov
- Raquel Vélez
- Rick Waldron
- Ralph Whitbeck
- Nicholas Zakas
Check them out, see if you like what they say, and follow who you like.
Also, this came out recently and is awesome: How to Keep Up to Date on Front-end Technologies
Meetups are great. You meet good people and see good talks. I'm a member of all of these in Boston that I would recommend:
- The Boston Backbone.js Meetup Group
- Boston Data Visualization
- Boston Front End Developers
- The Boston JavaScript Meetup Group
- BostonNodeJS
- CASCADE BOS
- The jQuery Boston Meetup Group
- Node.js in the wild
You didn't ask for books, but I'm going to recommend some anyway. Again, these are JS-focused. You don't have to read them all, but at you should probably understand most of what you've read before you move to the next level. It took me several times of reading through these before 90% of them made sense:
Object-Oriented JavaScript, by Stoyan Stefanov
JavaScript: The Good Parts, by Douglas Crockford JavaScript Patterns , by Stoyan Stefanov Learning JavaScript Design Patterns, by Addy Osmani Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, Third Edition, by Nicholas Zakas JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, by David Flanagan
Maintainable JavaScript, by Nicholas Zakas Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, by John Resig and Bear Bibeault