[leeny]

It may be worth finding a company you admire and working there for a year to get a feel for things like source control, the dynamics of many people working on one code base, design patterns, why people make the architectural decisions that they do, how systems scale, what makes a team work well together, etc.

None of this stuff is as easy to pick up on your own. Then, after you get a feel for how others do things, you can make informed decisions about how to run your own projects.