I joined a space yesterday on Twitter - backend engineers talking shop.
One thing that really stuck with me was the conversation around the difference between a backend developer and a backend engineer.
Consensus (or at least from most people who weighed in) was this: a software developer writes code - they convert technical requirements to actual lines of code. But an engineer? They think bigger. They handle the end-to-end architecture and orchestration of entire systems. They don't just code - they encode business logic, design thinking, and system flow into what they build.
One major skill that separates the two? Mastery of CI/CD.
Once you can write APIs and services, you're a developer. But once you can orchestrate the full CI/CD process - automate deployments, set up environments, manage releases - you're operating at the engineer level.
This hit home for me.
So from today, I'm committing to learning CI/CD from first principles. GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, canary releases, Grafana dashboards - all of it. Not just reading, but practicing. Implementing these into the projects I'm working on: Truefeet.ai, Coopwise.rtc, and more to come.
Mastering these tools and practices means I'll be able to build and release real-life software at scale. My target is 5,000 DAUs this year (we're at 200+ right now). If I can build systems to not only support this scale but also release updates reliably and fast, that's a milestone.
I guess we'll keep building and find out.