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And you'll have to figure out race conditions, deadlocks, and other fun challenges.
Mid-level backend engineer? Buy the book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and read it.
I've done the Fundamentals of Networking and Introduction to Database Engineering and recommend them. You can look up his content on YouTube to see if you like his instruction style, he's prolific there as well.
I’d recommend learning Elixir if your goal is to do a distributed systems project. For around $250 you can get a bundle with two excellent Elixir courses from PragmaticStudio.com.
I don't think tech courses or certificates have ever been a top consideration when reviewing backend engineer qualifications. Only if we're hiring for a specific technology that's niche. Most certificates just teach you how to understand/sell a specific technology stack which sometimes is helpful, but other times can make you not see simpler solutions. I'd check out what's freely available first. Your 400 dollars is…
Those certifications are worth having too. CKAD is a performance based exam and is therefore quite practical, which I think will make you a better engineer.
For backend engineering specific, some free & paid resources are
- O'Reilly Membership - This is a gold mine. For the $400 I believe you can purchase a yearly membership, where you get access to the entire O'Reilly catalogue. Designing Data Intensive Applications is included of course. They also have some video courses & conference talks in addition to the books. If you don't want to spend the $400 then they also offer a 7 day trial and don't ask for a credit card....
- quastor.org is a good read (but it's free). They follow all the big tech engineering blogs and send summaries of the interesting backend-dev blog posts.
- bytebytego - this is also free. It's mostly diagrams and provides a very high level overview but it's a good subscription. You can also purchase their books on their website.
- LeetCode membership - good for interview prep if you're looking for a FAANG-job, pretty much useless for everything else (could be helpful if you like competitive coding though!).
- Udemy Courses by Hussein Nasser - I really liked his course on databases. Delves into the different database engines, tradeoffs, query optimization, etc. He also has a YouTube channel with lots of free content.
- codecrafters - I haven't done this myself but it's a bunch of interesting challenges where you build a toy version of Redis, build a bittorrent client, build a toy version of Git, etc. Could be useful to understand how tech works. In terms of a free version, there's also (https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x) which is a collection of blog posts where you're building different things in various languages.
I’d recommend learning Elixir if your goal is to do a distributed systems project. For around $250 you can get a bundle with two excellent Elixir courses from PragmaticStudio.com.
Mid-level backend engineer? Buy the book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and read it.
I’d recommend learning Elixir if your goal is to do a distributed systems project. For around $250 you can get a bundle with two excellent Elixir courses from PragmaticStudio.com.
this, my startup's backend is elixir. really simplified making thing distributed from the get go. phoenix is just an amazing framework for building webapps anyway.