I am a full-stack developer with 6 years of fullstack experience. However lately I am mostly working with AI and have proficiency with Stable Diffusion and LLMs.
Very proficient with Python/Django on backend and React/JS on frontend.
I am a full-stack developer with 6 years of fullstack experience. However lately I am mostly working with AI and have proficiency with Stable Diffusion and LLMs.
Very proficient with Python/Django on backend and React/JS on frontend.
I am a full-stack developer with 6 years of fullstack experience. However lately I am mostly working with AI and have proficiency with Stable Diffusion and LLMs.
Very proficient with Python/Django on backend and React/JS on frontend.
I am a full-stack developer with 6 years of fullstack experience. However lately I am mostly working with Gen AI and have proficiency with Stable Diffusion.
Very proficient with Python/Django on backend and React/JS on frontend.
I'm more of a web dev "code monkey" and good enough writing simple backend apps.
I was actually thinking about more deep-dive into database design and what`s not.
I am fairly sure I can construct queries and understand simpler topics like indexes. However, I am completely lost on optimization techniques like sharding, for example.
If it's interesting to you, go for it! You'll probably learn a ton more about anything if you're interested, even if it's not 100% relevant to your job, than you would forcing yourself to learn something you feel certain would be relevant but isn't sparking your interest.
Complex distributed apps are incredibly difficult to get started with, at first. They are a huge leap up from simple CRUD because of the atomicity and consistency requirements.
Can you look for a junior position in a medium to big company, or a startup, with enough engineers to help mentor you?
If you want to try it yourself, you can start by experimenting with database clones, redis shards, K8s, etc., and then try reimplementing the same things in various cloud providers, so you can get a basic understanding of a shared/sharded data model in various frameworks.
Or, if you want to leapfrog all that, you can jump straight to serverless stores like Firebase or https://www.cloudflare.com/products/workers-kv/ that abstract away the infrastructure and let you focus on writing business logic on top of that.
But IMO you will learn more quickly from one year on the job, during professional backend work in a capable team, than self-learning willy-nilly (where you can pick up a lot of bad practices, or outdated/inappropriate architectures).
It may not be common, but I don't think it's inherently not doable. I worked at a Ruby/Rails startup that had a monolithic API codebase, but also a number of new microservices written in Go using various AWS products. The Platform team that maintained all of this was small like 3-pizza-small and we hired both junior devs as well as interns if they showed an appropriate aptitude. So I wouldn't rule it out. Btw the example company is gone for this intent/purpose but did exist as such.
In general I think working at (very) small startups is the best way for very capable, self-learner types to be exposed and allowed to do lots of things in a short time as it's basically a free-for-all matching tasks with anyone who can get it done.
Edit: after writing this, I realize that the other Ruby/Rails place I'm working at (Shopify) does let non-senior devs do some complicated stuff in the core monolith and jobs that gets reviewed by senior devs. The team I'm on runs Kanban-style 2-week minicycles (didn't like Sprint'ing) and encourage different people to try tackling different things, often with pairing or review of proposed approach.
Just using microservices doesn't automatically mean your app is distributed, though, or resilient/reliable/maintainable/scalable/consistent/atomic, etc. Microservices increase complexity but don't automatically guarantee improved quality.
More to the point: The tricky part of doing it all yourself is you have no idea if you're doing it well, and whether it would survive heavy real-world use and other devs/teams/companies/APIs/user agents. It's not easy for a solo dev to catch pitfalls that more experienced devs, or just more # of devs, might notice in a pair programming sesh or code review.
By all means experiment on your own, but IMO I found teams to be much more helpful for actually learning best practices rather than barebones spaghetti code. Startups count too! What you may lose in learning architectural best practices (depending on if you have any seniors and how good they are), you gain in problem-solving and research abilities, not to mention learning to do a lot of things at low cost.
You’re only a couple years into your career. They’re not going to throw you into the deep end right away. You have to work up toward it over time and usually change companies a few times to get there.
Which is the sad part. It's difficult to get good unless you have the responsibility of doing something challenging. I have similar experience to OP but am now tech lead and managing the infra, which has given me the confidence to take on other devops stuff.
The best way to get into distributed systems is to start building them. Create an OSS project in the space, put it on your resume and whatnot, blog about it, and they will come
In that case, the best thing to do is to feel out the organization you're in, and make yourself indispensable.
Do most of the new hires want to work on server-side code; but your UI is challenging and pushes the browser to its limits? Lean more towards in-browser work; and accomplish critical in-browser tasks that your management has trouble finding someone to do.
Likewise, is your in-browser code trivial, but your application is visibly too slow to the point that management has heat on them to make it more responsive? Focus on optimizing the data access layer, and become indispensable there.
Where I've had success is looking for areas of a product that you just can't "open a book" to learn how to implement. The problem space should have a high degree of novelty to it. These problems exist in all layers of the stack. In my case, I became lead for Syncplicity's desktop client, a major Dropbox competitor. For awhile my code was a market leader. (We were the only desktop file sync product that could handle 100,000+ files.)
Another area of success that I've had is in young companies, where team sizes are too small to really specialize. In my current role, I'm doing "full stack C#" with Blazor in the UI. (We chose it so that it would be easy for developers to move back and forth between UI and server-side code.) As we grow I'll probably focus more on back-end work; but at the moment, "full stack" is useful because I can make an API change in a single pull request without coordinating with anyone else.
Edit: As far as money goes, you will need some flexibility. I've taken a few below-market-rate jobs because they were interesting; then when I saw money flow into the company I had to raise a ruckus in order to get to market rate. It's not something I like doing, but unfortunately, that's how the world works, and that's why I keep focusing on becoming indispensable.
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: TypeScript, React, Python, Django, Stable Diffusion
Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zYJba52hg6SaDDnmDoL0e5z2...
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/yernarakimzhanov
Email: yernarakimzhanov at gmail dot com
I am a full-stack developer with 6 years of fullstack experience. However lately I am mostly working with AI and have proficiency with Stable Diffusion and LLMs.
Very proficient with Python/Django on backend and React/JS on frontend.