I am a fullstack frontend leaning engineer of 10 YoE (still employed). In the early days of my career I enjoyed learning about various programming languages and reading technical books (although mostly tutorials, nothing to deep technically). These days I don't do those things anymore because I am now older, a lot of responsibilities, and hobbies that I need to do, and also quite comfortable in my comfort zone in terms of my niche.

I don't do anything anymore these days to advance my career in SWE. Maybe because I am quite jaded because job market sucks, and the job itself sucks (making the rich richer), and any extra time I need to do to advance my career is just doing leetcode monkey grind.

I want to change it this year. I do CRUD apps, and I am very boxed in my brain, thinking that CRUD apps is the only programming there is. I often marveled at people who create database, compilers, emulators, 3D engines, version controls, text editors, etc. Those people are like wizards to me.

I wonder how can I be creative like that? Like, how can you just wake up one day and decide to create magic.

I want to learn how to do those. Any advice is appreciated.

Also I want to do it in Zig because I've never worked with manual memory management language before, and I figured might as well.

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moltar 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was in a similar situation a few years back. I wasn’t only focusing on CRUD, but it was a large part of my work too. Mostly working on web-based SaaS projects.

I started learning infra via AWS CDK (TypeScript). And by osmosis learned a lot about cloud native application architecture. Which changed my way of creating web apps entirely and rejuvenated my love for software. Still going strong 5 years later. Now with much stronger focus on platform engineering and not working on features much.

	▲	caro_kann 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Looks like I'm in that path you've already passed. From January I have to learn CDK because my current job requires me to do. Also planning on to obtain those AWS Cloud Certificates.

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hsuduebc2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Heh same here. Get stuck in crud apps because it's easy, comfy and well paid. I would like to start something entirely different than computer related but I'm limited to a flat. So something like mushroom growing, or hydroponics seems good.

Writing my own compiler would be compelling but I somehow have a problem to do things only for sake of learning. Would love to have the knowledge tho. Anyway happy new year!