HACKER Q&A
📣 shivajikobardan

Infra engineer is boring and I want to start with development


I started my career as a technical support engineer. I then started homelabbing and learning Infrastructure Engineering and Operations. But soon I realized this is all boring(it is not a creative profession at all. You get some adrenaline rush solving simple but critical issues on production but that is about it. No creativity is required.). I am looking to enter backend developer route as a Java Dev. But I already have 2.5 years of technical support engineer experience. How can I plan the switch?

I have been learning Java basics and oops since 1+ year ago(without thinking of being a java developer in mind, just wanted to boost my programming skills). Now I am torn between two paths.

Learn devops/modern sysadmin

OR

Learn development with spring boot(It is the widely used technology here in country).

I need to invest in a new computer if I were to learn intermediate devops which will cost me 600 bucks. I feel like it is a pure waste of money without having a job to do that.

But I do not need anything to learn spring boot development.

I am currently free whole day. What path should I seek that would give me higher ROI in the long run?

  👤 baobun Accepted Answer ✓
Going deep on programming for a while will be a big edge and strength when/if you lean back into devops later. Especially if you feel more passion/fun there.

Starting with focus on one language (java) first sounds good but once you feel reasonably fluent I do encourage you to pick up another language or two.

C, Go, Rust, Python, , maybe Ruby or .NET (C# or F#) would all be decent picks depending on your path IMO.

Oh, and bash of course. It will serve you well whichever way you go. (Maybe you have that down already from homelabbing?)