Subhas

I would like to point out a possible problem with the generic advice "read books" "follow blogs etc."

=> technological bias

As you are from Node/Express and Mongodb background the biggest risk is trying to become only better in these technologies. So you will only know how to make faster horses, how to train them for the best, but you will never learn car exists.

More than best practices, what makes a great developer valuable (especially in a position like you where other people in your company are less experienced than you) is your ability to see wider not deeper.

Try to challenge the status quo ? Why MongoDB? What kind of alternative do you have ? Same for Node + Express.

Doing so will force you to see where your tool shine and where it reach its limit. Doing so will permit you to know when you need to dig deeper on "how to use better this tool", and when to step back and "wait a minute, no amount of best-practices/knowledge will balance the fact that MongoDB is just no the right tool here"

So read a lot, but also from people that are not from your community (and to be honest HN is a good starter on getting different point of view)

The other important things is about perspective, it's not because a googler/guy from netflix wrote about how they needed to split the code in microservices, or needed to implement $design-pattern-with-a-very-cool-name that it does apply to you.

Especially looking to the size of your dev team, I think the worst things that could happen to…