I'm a backend engineer with seven years of experience, and I'm feeling overwhelmed by all the new trends in programming like AI and other buzzwords. I want to shift my focus towards understanding fundamental low-level concepts that are valuable in our field. What skills should I dive into? I'm thinking about topics like TCP/IP, HTTP, memory management, or even assembly language and CPU architecture. Any suggestions?
5 Answers
Getting comfortable with SQL can be quite useful, even if some debate whether it's 'low-level.' It’s relatively easy to learn the basics, but it can get complex when optimizing queries for large datasets. If you're not keen on it because of AI tools, maybe reconsider how it plays into broader database management.
Yeah, I personally avoided SQL too, now that AI tools can handle my database queries accurately.
One interesting low-level skill you might want to explore is security. It's often overlooked and not well understood by many developers. With the rise of AI technologies, there’s a growing gap in security knowledge, which makes it a critical area to delve into.
Definitely! New technologies always have delayed security implications. It seems especially pronounced with AI; many don't grasp the security risks until it’s too late.
Networking is a key area to consider. Many devs don’t fully grasp the OSI model or common networking errors. Understanding how components interact in a microservice architecture is crucial. It can save you time diagnosing issues when you know the basics of networking.
If you're really looking to go deep, learning about the TCP and HTTP protocols in detail is a great path. From there, you can explore system-level programming with POSIX syscalls or even dive into something like memory architecture and CPU design.
It’s fascinating to get that low. Understanding how hardware interacts with software really clarifies a lot of principles.
You might also want to specialize in concurrency and multithreading, as these are tricky areas where a lot can go wrong. Knowing the memory model of the programming language you work with can be a game-changer, especially in high-performance applications.
Great point! I’d also throw in the concept of idempotency for safe operations in distributed systems.
I agree, but I think of low-level more in terms of assembly or hardware. SQL feels more high-level to me, especially since AI can handle a lot of it now.