·4 min
I Don't Need Your Title. Neither Do You.
Stop chasing job titles. Start chasing knowledge. The title doesn't make you competent.
careeropinion
Tech Blog
Deep dives into system design, backend architecture, and modern development practices.
Stop chasing job titles. Start chasing knowledge. The title doesn't make you competent.
You don't have Netflix's problems. You have 3 developers and a Postgres database.
Everyone's drawing boxes and arrows. Nobody's shipping code. System design matters, but not as much as Twitter thinks.
Everyone talks about clean code. Nobody talks about the feature that never shipped because someone was too busy renaming variables.
Cloudflare went from 'that CDN company' to a full cloud platform. Most startups should look there first.
ACID sounds simple until you learn what READ COMMITTED actually allows.
You type a prompt, an AI writes code. Simple, right? Behind the scenes, it's five systems arguing with each other.
Reddit moved their comments system from Python to Go. The unglamorous reality of migration.
Grab rewrote Go to Rust. Latency? Same. CPU usage? 5x better. Know the difference.
Everyone defaults to OpenAI. Grab built a 1B model that's faster and cheaper. When should you stop renting?
Netflix ripped out Kafka, Cassandra, and three cache layers. Because every cache is a lie.
Most devs treat payments like CRUD. Then money disappears.
UUIDs aren't always the answer. Here's when they hurt more than help.
Beyond a point, your reputation determines how high you go. And it takes years to build one that matters.
Synchronous calls work until they don't. Then you need a message queue. Here's why.
When direct data transfer becomes unwieldy, add a layer of indirection. Netflix learned this the hard way.
You optimized the wrong thing. Again. Here's why guessing at performance never works.
Two servers, one resource, zero coordination. Here's how it breaks.
You have 10 million saved searches. A new item comes in. How do you find all matches without running 10 million queries?
The hidden state in your servers is why you can't just 'add more boxes'.
That abstraction layer you're building? You don't need it yet.
5 years of experience, 200 applications, 3 callbacks. Something is very wrong.
High throughput doesn't mean low latency. Often it means the opposite.
Browser address bar to rendered page. 2 seconds. 14 steps. Most developers can't name half of them.
You added servers but nothing got faster. Here's why.
Partial failures, network lies, clock drift. Everything that makes distributed systems a nightmare.
API Gateway handles the outside chaos. Service mesh handles the inside chaos.
Your API works at 100 RPS. At 10,000, everything falls apart. The systematic approach to not dying.
You don't have to prove you deserve the role. You already got it.
From autocomplete to copilots to autonomous agents. Most developers don't see what's changing.