5 YOE but have only done web app development. How should I learn more?
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leand122
Feb 23
5 Comments
I’ve been working as a frontend / full stack developer for 5+ years. So far all I have done is pretty much just feature development and bug fixes at 2 small companies <70, and I have never been involved in technical architecture stuff.
I hove no experience with things that system design courses teach you, therefore I was wondering how I should learn it myself? Is going through grokking enough for me?
All I know is just about how to develop features with JS/React/Node and I started to realize how uneducated I was after having some interviews.
How should I break from this environment? Thanks.
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Were your startups all monolithic backends? They didnt have micro-services, data pipelines, sharded dbs, and various apps, products, and apis?
So I really dont have any overall system design experience unfortunately.
Grokking will help but I think sometimes it focuses on the wrong or somewhat superficial things. I would suggest also getting your head around a couple practical things that often come up, in addition to the grokkking exercies.
1. NoSQL vs Sql in a 'systems design' context. Grokking talks about this a lot.
2. Relational db schemas. This comes up sometimes and is not quick to learn. Start small with something like a multi-user todo list app. Consider how many tables your queries might require and how what cols you need to index. This is not a big leap from having good Object Oriented intuition.
3. Async job queues and messaging services...how they can connect systems together via 'workers' that pull jobs off of them. Also, how you can manage retries, recovery from outages (ie 'replay' failed jobs), and maybe monitor the depth of these job queues.
4. API design and what the requests actually look like as they go from service to service, but you probably have good intution here.