Ask HN: Advice for Restarting Career as a Back End Developer

3 points by tirthbodawala 2 years ago | 7 comments

Hey HN community,

I'm looking for some guidance on restarting my career as a backend API developer. Currently, I have experience in PHP, NodeJS and Python, but I want to pivot towards working with compiled programming languages like C, C++, Rust, Go, or Zig. I believe these languages can offer benefits such as faster response times and the ability to compile code into bytecode for deployment.

I would appreciate your insights and suggestions on the following aspects:

Community: Which programming languages have thriving communities and active developer support? It's essential for me to have resources and a community where I can seek assistance and learn from others.

Bytecode Compilation: I'm interested in languages that can be compiled into bytecode or have similar deployment options. This will enable me to efficiently deploy my code to production environments.

Performance: Given that I aim to work on backend APIs, speed and response time are crucial factors. I'd like to explore languages that can deliver fast response times and perform well in production environments.

I value your expertise and experience, so any advice or recommendations you can offer regarding the languages I should consider, learning resources, or other relevant aspects would be highly appreciated.

Thank you all for your support!

AndyKelley 2 years ago |

My suggestion is to spend less time doing the kinds of work that you want to move away from, and start spending more time doing the kinds of work that you want to move towards doing. People notice what you do, and associate you with it, and then ask you to continue doing more of the same.

It might sound like I'm being flip, but I'm not. The problem is that following this advice is difficult. It might involve, for example, ignoring the tasks you are actually supposed to be working on, and doing other tasks instead which are more aligned with your career progression. This could have the affect of pissing off your boss, or getting you fired if you're not careful. This is a line that you have to toe if you want to change your career path swiftly.

It may involve, as another example, deleting most items from your resume, so that it contains only the things you want to work on. If your resume is then missing too much, you'll need to find creative ways to gain experience, such as doing meaningful work for open source projects. If you have a comfortable savings, one thing you could do would be take a year off work to spend time on gaining skills, notoriety, and personal connections via open source projects which you could then put on your resume.

To reiterate: you will do more of what you work on. So, do everything you can to avoid spending time on the wrong kind of tasks for your goals.

cassepipe 2 years ago |

Sorry this is not career because I don't have a career yet but technical suggestions

Since you're pivoting to backend work you may be interested in htmx which allows you to have to superpowers over the frontend as a backend dev.

Elixir has a supportive community and people must quite happy to use it because they are very nice. Everyone seems to be loving it (including me) so they must be doing something right. I have only superficially learned it but it was indeed a fun and interesting endeavour. I haven't tried Phoenix, the Elixir web framework, but I hear it is similar in conception to htmx but more integrated with the language. Is the community thriving ? Well at least it's not dwindling and the morale is high

brudgers 2 years ago |

The way to switch career directions is to get a new position...or morph your current position (the worst that could happen is you get fired and then you get a new position anyway).

Grad school is the other way to reposition a career.

However, you have a day job so you can do the things you dream of doing. So if you dream of playing with C, play with C after work. Just like you would play the guitar or golf.

Good luck.

tirthbodawala 2 years ago | |

Thank you for the kind Advice. I will do that post work :) However I want to get opinions on which Programming language to focus for getting work in backend done with speed and performance.

avkpatel 2 years ago |

I would say for backend i would say GO Lang is best.

tirthbodawala 2 years ago | |

So are there production ready frameworks for GO Lang? I want to go with Rust and Ziglang, but they are still alpha/beta there is no production release for either of them. Please correct me if I am wrong, I have limited knowledge and it may be outdated as well.

cassepipe 2 years ago | | |

Zig has not reached 1.0 yet but Rust is already 1.70

Since you mentionned bytecode compilation, both can be compiled to wasm. I haven't used any of the wasm runtimes yet but I know they exist.