Benjo ❁

Something funny happened to me yesterday

As a software engineer, since you aren't coding by hand as much, you should be reading as much

If you want to be a top-tier backend engineer in 2026, here’s the path I’d recommend - in roughly the order I’d take it: 1. Data Structures & Algorithms (properly) Not for LeetCode tricks, but to build real intuition: caches, queues, heaps, indexes, bloom filters, rate limiters. You should be able to implement the basics without panic. 2. Operating Systems fundamentals Processes vs threads, memory management, virtual memory, syscalls, file descriptors, scheduling. Backend performance issues are often OS issues in disguise. 3. Networking & Distributed Systems basics TCP vs UDP, HTTP/1.1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3, DNS, load balancing, retries, timeouts, backpressure. If you don’t understand networks, you don’t understand backends. 4. Databases (deep, not wide) Pick one SQL database (Postgres) and go deep: indexes, query planners, MVCC, isolation levels, WAL, replication. Then learn why NoSQL exists, not just when to use it. 5. Consistency, Transactions & Failure Models CAP, consensus (Raft/Paxos at a conceptual level), idempotency, exactly-once vs at-least-once, saga patterns. This is where many “senior” engineers fall apart. 6. A systems language (Go or Rust) Go: concurrency, networking, cloud-native systems Rust: safety, performance, correctness Most modern infra and backend platforms are written in one of these. 7. Concurrency & Parallelism (in practice) Thread pools, async runtimes, event loops, actor models, work queues. Learn how things break under load, not just how they work on paper. 8. Observability & Production Debugging Metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, alerting, profiling. Learn to debug memory leaks, latency spikes, and cascading failures at 3am. 9. Cloud & Infrastructure fundamentals Containers, Kubernetes basics, autoscaling, service discovery, CI/CD. You don’t need to be a DevOps expert, but you must understand the platform your code runs on. 10. Security fundamentals AuthN vs AuthZ, TLS, secrets management, common attack vectors, threat modeling. Backend engineers are security engineers whether they like it or not. The pattern here is simple: Easy backend jobs are over. CRUD alone won’t cut it. Strong fundamentals let you move fast, reason under pressure, and design systems that survive reality - not just pass interviews. There are no shortcuts anymore. But if you build these skills seriously, even if you stumble, you’ll come out dangerously competent.

New 30-day hackathon project loading! ⏳ Just in time for the holidays...

Coursera has acquired Udemy for $900M 🤯