Heck, I'd kill for some kind of apprenticeship/mentoring program. I'm perfectly comfortable hacking all this out on my own, but I know there's AN AWFUL LOT I'm missing.

I use techniques that are less than optimal but they work well enough at the scale of our environment. But I also know there are better methods out there and as I learn them, I implement them. I take care to structure things to make refactoring as painless as possible.

It would be nice to have someone around I could bounce ideas off of and could help me fill in the gaps. Far too often web crawling yields little more than quasi-religious rants on why X is "evil" or just code snippets that leave me practically yelling "Why? WHY are you doing it that way?" At least here folks are willing to explain things given the limits of an on-line forum. The various "Stairways" have been invaluable as they cover big topics in manageable chunks.

But even so, that's worlds different from having a living, breathing body you can talke to in real time.