Re:Ask HN: How did you become a hardcore back-end developer?
by CyberFonic on Friday March 04, 2011 @06:25PM
(#2290245)
For me the path the heavy duty back-ends was Unix and C. Most of the work for large corporations, in addition to the mainframes, involves big systems; IBM: AIX, HP: HPUX, Sun: Solaris. Helps to know a bit about storage: EMC, Hitachi, NetApps, etc. And of course databases, DB2, Oracle.
The best news is that these days, you can build up these skills using a $1k box with Linux or BSD. Years ago, you needed to get a job first because systems were in the order of $millions and they wouldn't fit in your average spare room.
You'll also need to demonstrate so CS/SE chops, because mucking up a big back-end system is not like a web page that occasionally crashes, it can cost $10k's per hour while it's down.
The best news is that these days, you can build up these skills using a $1k box with Linux or BSD. Years ago, you needed to get a job first because systems were in the order of $millions and they wouldn't fit in your average spare room.
You'll also need to demonstrate so CS/SE chops, because mucking up a big back-end system is not like a web page that occasionally crashes, it can cost $10k's per hour while it's down.