Comment by j on "Is developing a large scale system really one of critical factors leading to becoming a good developer?"

Does driving a car make you a better cyclist? I don't know :) ....

I help build really large applications. I mean petabyte of data in a week and real-time communications with millions of users and clients.

I still suck at wordpress or writing binary communication protocols. I can use kafka and build clustered docker-boxes as worker systems with apache spark and write asynchronous worker from scratch in 8 different languages.

It makes you a better developer for bigger distributed systems.

The skillset is just different, it's more complex. Did you write a modern react app with redux maybe with worker systems and real time sockets, this is also very complex it is just deemed less special.

Being curious makes you a better developer, challenge yourself on a regular basis. The rest is often just problem domain switching ...

I do recommend building big things, actually I recommend switching through different industries and domains. It helps you gain perspective

Those are my thoughts.

I really like this answer, though it's important to note that the fact that these skills are deemed different with regards to being special leads to difference in pay so therefor I still think one should consider shifting their skillset to large scale system design and architecture.

I really like this post on a related topic of the three stages of a computer scientists

Þorvaldur Rúnarsson that's a good article thx :) I will checkout some of the books ^^

My 2 Cents: developing large scale systems today is easier than ever or even possible, which is absolutely great. However a single developer will never good enough to handle the whole stack it should. That's teams are for :)

Sebastian I totally agree, even if one developer is good enough there is the factor of time. Very often in meetings with talented and smart people they tend to ignore that they are just 1 person and it's not only about ability it's about the amount of time needed to do things. So yes you need a good team :) it's actually paramount.

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