Rich Hickey has some great talks on YouTube. If you are a software engineer: Build a simple database, a simple interpreter, and a simple web application (backend and frontend). Read about “distributed systems”, “devops”, “Conway’s Game Of Life”, and “fractals”. Read about these technologies/techniques (in whatever order is comfortable), how they work, their pros and cons, why they were created, how they compare to al…
Started by building my own build system, monitoring solutions, taking at stab orchestration problems, graph databases etc.
The problem statement would be super simple like how do I install my application on 100 servers? And I will start off with bash, tar, ssh and work my way up.
The goal isn't too finish. You want to discover the problems first hand, decide upfront how you would evaluate an acceptable solution, attempt a naive solution, and then look at an open source system, note the family of algorithms + data structures then loop back and move onto the next set of problems in the domain.
Ideally the system you're building is distributed.
Mostly I work from the outside going in and counterintuitively I start with the two non-functional requirements, as questions: how fast do you want it to go, secondly how badly can the system fail. I find that I'm peculiar in this approach.
This won't work for everyone. It has for me because it's allowed me to build a handy library of interrogative and evaluative heuristics and develop strong understanding system architectures and design