Ask HN: I'm a generalist developer I'd like to specialise. What should I choose?

Re:Ask HN: I'm a generalist developer I'd like to specialise... by codegeek on Monday August 15, 2016 @02:48PM (#12292537)

When I think of specialist developers, I imagine being specialist in a business domain. This is not to say that being an AWS expert does not have its benefits. But if you do want to specialize, I will suggest going with a business domain. For example, if you are ReactJS specialist today, what guarantee do you have that ReactJS will be hot tomorrow ? Who knows. But if you are an expert in say cryptography, security, finance, healthcare etc, I will bet they are not going anywhere anytime soon.

My 2 cents. All the points I made are certainly arguable.

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Re:Ask HN: I'm a generalist developer I'd like to specialise... by acesubido on Tuesday August 16, 2016 @03:30AM (#12296047)

This. On security, if you want to do Infra/Platforms:

  - AWS or Google Cloud architect 
  ...
  - Devops consulting for small agencies

You can do on-premise devops for big companies as well.

Being a lead dev in your company, you probably have an idea of the truckloads of money large companies pay to get their on-premise infrastructure and platforms to be PCI-DSS compliant, fulfilling generic hardening requirements, enforcing data governance policies and frequently passing pentests.

Build an ansible playbook that does a huge chunk of these things and turn the roles/tasks into powerpoint slides; it would land you these gigs.

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Re:Ask HN: I'm a generalist developer I'd like to specialise... by slice-beans on Monday August 15, 2016 @03:14PM (#12292697)

Now that you've mentioned this I think it may become a theme, and rightly so. Perhaps a change in focus and a bit of reflection on the different business domains that I have experience in is in order.

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