[Townley]

It's hard to get "better" at something because it can mean so many things. Describing the attributes that makes you better with MongoDB, APIs, or software development gets you a lot of the way towards learning how to do it.

Take Mongo for example: is the issue that your database keeps going down? If you frame it that way, it doesn't take long to discover clustering, replicasets, and monitoring. Is the issue that your queries are hammering the server? If so, googling that leads you down a months-long rabbit hole that ends in indexing, caching, and denormalizing strategies. Are you frustrated with the amount of boilerplate needed to get mongo data to the frontend? That's a good hint that you're in the market for a library/framework that might help with that.

Much in the same way that one of the hardest parts of solving a bug is knowing what to Google, specifically defining what "better" looks like is the first step towards getting there.