Eric Roby

Backend engineering can get highly technical.

It’s far more than just REST endpoints and simple CRUD operations.

It also includes:
• Caching.
• Data modeling.
• Load balancing.
• Cloud technologies.
• Distributed systems.
• Autoscaling infrastructure.
• Rate limiting and throttling.
• Security and authentication.
• Monitoring and observability.
• Concurrency and idempotency.
• Job scheduling and cron systems.
• Database optimization and indexing.
• Events, message queues, and workers.

And this list could go on.

The key to growth? Consistency. Commit to learning something new every day.

The fastest way to stall your growth as a backend developer?

“Only learning enough to get it working.“

I see this all the time.

With AI tools, it's never been easier to find quick solutions.

But that convenience comes with a risk:
If you skip the why and the how, you'll hit a wall.

You won't be able to debug it.
You won't know how to scale it.
You won't see the tradeoffs in your own architecture.

Anyone can copy-paste code.

But great engineers understand the why.

I don't mind if you're not great at coding.

What's important to me is that you:
• Can communicate.
• Can solve business problems.

I can teach you to be great at coding.
• YouTube can also teach you.
• Google can also teach you.
• ChatGPT can also teach you.

Anyone can learn coding.

But not everyone can solve problems well when working with a team.