My background is electrical engineering, DSP to be more precise. The company I currently work for does a lot of diverse projects, mostly building analog hardware. Being somewhat closer to computers than everybody else around here I'm often the one writing code for both embedded devices (which I'm perfectly fine with) and Windows or Linux OS. It is the latter that is foreign territory to me.
I can code, and I know a few languages (C/C++, Java, some VB.NET), but I only used them for algorithm simulations in signal and image processing, neural networks, and other similar applications. For me programming has been a computational tool more than anything else. However, I get more and more projects where I have to write proper full-fledged software, and I don't really know how to do it, because I never had to do it, and I was never really interested enough. I have myself seen quite a few engineers who got converted into coders to a certain degree because of job demands, and most of them weren't that great at what they did. I'm sure many people have encountered the same.
If I were to learn writing proper software with good user interface, good internal architecture and so on, how do I do it? We don't have anyone at work who could tell me what's good practice and what isn't. Given that I can write code in the rawest sense of the word, what else is there to know about writing good software and how I do I get there on my own?