Six months as the only developer at a non-tech company. What I'm doing to not quietly rot.

Manufacturing company, about forty people, and I am the entire technology department. I maintain an internal inventory app someone built in 2019 and I add whatever operations asks for next. No code review, no standup, no senior looking over my shoulder. Nobody in the building could tell you whether I wrote something decent or something horrifying.

The pay is fine and my manager is genuinely kind. The fear is that in two years I'll interview somewhere real and find out I repeated my first six months four times.

What's helped so far:

• I review my own PRs, but with a delay. I open one, leave it overnight, and read it the next morning like a stranger wrote it. Catches far more than reading it immediately ever did.
• Every couple of weeks I read through an open-source repo in our stack. Not to contribute, just to see what normal looks like when a competent person writes it.
• I write down every decision and the reason for it, since there's nobody here to argue with me. About half look wrong a month later, and that half is the useful part.

All of which is still me grading my own homework. If you've worked solo: how did you keep your standards honest, and how rough was the landing when you finally joined a real team?