Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

Since other comments already point to getting a job, I'd mention other options. One is going to university and being exposed to more technologies and most importantly, meeting other people and working with them. Other similar options are going through the syllabus yourself and partnering with other people in hackathons or similar group events.

I would like to also offer a different perspective on the idea of "big" web apps or more "professional" setups. If what you want is to be able to do more complex projects for your customers or for yourself, just do that. Solve the problems you need to accomplish your goals. Maybe your development cadence could improve from getting better at testing. Maybe you're not happy not knowing how to maintain or deploy your code. Focus on your path and your problems and forget about what you "should" be doing. That's how most people become proficient engineers. Meanwhile keep up with industry news and read a few books per year, and know that the best way to really kick this into overdrive is working alongside more experienced people in a team.

how does one simply “get hired” while being mid career with no professional sw experience? asking for a friend.

Yes, agreed. I was in almost the same boat, mostly building small websites as a freelancer and wanting to learn more and work on more interesting problems.

I went a 3-month programming bootcamp, got hired as a junior software engineer at a non-profit with a small engineering team (~10 people), and learned a _ton_ about the sorts of things you’re talking about (automated testing and deployment, container technology, JS pipelines, etc.). I also became a much better programmer through years of code reviews and pair programming. If you can find a place that’s big enough to have several people far more experienced than yourself and at least one of them is willing to help you out when you need it, you’ll probably get where you’re trying to go!

I would invest in learning Rails 7 and Hotwire. Seems to have a great ROI for the effort put in. It can scale pretty far as well and you will be able to focus more time on delivering value.

The technical excellence road has a lot of dead ends and false prophets. Be aware!

Simple, you usually don't need that. Most devs now a days don't know how to build efficient websites. That's why they need a tech Stack like the Mount Everest and create a dependency hell. It was possible to serve more then 250k unique users per day from a single VM more than 10y ago on shitty hardware. You can deliver so much more on modern tech if you stick to KISS principle.

But yes, some rare sites do need to scale above >1M unique users, that's where the trouble begins. You can start by benchmarking everything you build. Think of every line of code and optimize it, or you just build your stack in smaller pieces and scale out using modern tech Stack. The question is, what do you want to learn. The first way would learn you how to build efficient software, the second one would teach you how to waste lots of resources but be new, modern and a hipster. And in addition, now a days employees are so expensive, that a company don't care about Cloud costs if this makes dev faster.