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Ask HN: Best Tech Courses/Certifications Under $400 for a Back End Engineer?

107 points by ridiculous_leke ↗ HN
I'm a mid-level Software Engineer with a focus on Backend engineering, primarily working with application servers and some DevOps. I have a budget of $400 and I'm looking for recommendations on technology courses or certifications that can help me advance my skills. My main goal is to work on a personal project related to distributed systems, but I'm also considering certifications like AWS Solutions Architect and CKAD to enhance my job prospects. Can you recommend specific courses or certifications within this budget? Additionally, I'd love to hear about any personal experiences or insights you have regarding these certifications or technology courses. Your advice will be greatly appreciated!

69 comments

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brian_herman
Terraform Associate is $70 and a good cert for backend engineering.
jumpman500
I don't think tech courses or certificates have ever been a top consideration when reviewing backend engineer qualifications. Only if we're hiring for a specific technology that's niche. Most certificates just teach you how to understand/sell a specific technology stack which sometimes is helpful, but other times can make you not see simpler solutions. I'd check out what's freely available first.

Your 400 dollars is probably better spent making mistakes building your own personal project on aws/or some other cloud provider.

qaq
Highly depends many consulting shops have to have requisite amount of AWS certified professionals to maintain the partnership status with AWS. They highly value people who have appropriate AWS certs.
moneywoes
which AWS certs are these in particular?

Is worth considering other certs e.g. gcp, azure for the same reason?

anyoneamous
Solutions Architect Associate is the way to go - definitely the broadest coverage and most approachable. Won't get you a job by itself but I would find it a bit odd if I was hiring someone who works with AWS already and doesn't have this.
Aeolun
> I would find it a bit odd if I was hiring someone who works with AWS already and doesn't have this

Is it? I work with AWS every day, and I feel like getting the certificate will add absolutely nothing to my expertise, so it’s just wasted money.

ecshafer
I thought the Developer and Solutions Architect were both a complete waste of time compared to actual day to day work with AWS.
oceanplexian
I was an AWS employee for 5 years, launched a new AWS service, and don’t have that. I guess my dreams are crushed without the Solutions Architect Associate credentials, lol.
anyoneamous
I was an AWS employee too and found that people building services basically lived in a completely different world, hardly ever actuallyusing AWS - so I'm not surprised.
nelup20
Indeed, the AWS/Azure certifications are quite popular/sought-after & the only ones that seem worth getting, even for non-consulting jobs.

Also the Java Professional certificates are the big ones for Java shops.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh
Yeah, but then you'd have to work in consulting. ;)

A related idea is to just take the 400 bucks and spend it on AWS playing around. Spin up a few Kubernetes clusters, try out their various database offerings, maybe see if you can run a load-test and get your play system to auto-scale.

That would also require keeping a sharp eye on the billing side to make sure the total cost doesn't go over $400... but, hey, that's part of the learning, too!

throwaway167
To add to that: Document it, through a blog or other. Even if that doesn't get read, it's evidence, and hopefully it would.
ChatGTP
I Agree, OP should gain to seek experience and read some books such as Release It! by Nygard.

Those certifications are worth having too. CKAD is a performance based exam and is therefore quite practical, which I think will make you a better engineer.

a_t48
It’s probably an L&D stipend
Bognar
Mid-level backend engineer? Buy the book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and read it.
arrowsmith
Seconded - this book is fantastic. I wish I'd read it much earlier in my career.
OJFord
I would also go for books, but if OPs here asking for courses they probably know they learn better that way/prefer it.
coffee_
I’m a junior engineer and my manager recommended this book. A lot of it flew over my head but now I can sit in meetings and kind of following along with what’s going on. It’s a dense book and I’m glad I read it!
AlexErrant
There's an audiobook too, if that's your style.
utopcell
An audiobook is hardly an appropriate format for this kind of content. It is even worse for this book in particular since it contains a lot of figures and tables. YMMV.
bdcravens
Certs just aren't that important anymore, but if anything, I'd do the AWS cert.

If you just want to improve your skills, a few good Udemy courses will take your far if you follow along.

giantg2
Some places like to see AWS certs. Doesn't AWS cut a slight rate break based on the number of certified people you have in your org?
potta_coffee
I've worked for a couple of companies that get a discount on AWS services if a certain percentage of their employees have AWS certifications.
moneywoes
Which AWS Cert in particular?
isbvhodnvemrwvn
Solution Architect Associate is what I'd recommend to start with. Practitioner is for non-technical people, Developer Associate and Sysops Associate are just marginally different than SA, often focusing on services which are marginally useful at best (few people use AWS CI/CD solutions and it makes up most of the difference for developer cert), I wouldn't bother with them. I haven't heard anything about the data engineer one (it seems new).
innocentoldguy
I’d recommend learning Elixir if your goal is to do a distributed systems project. For around $250 you can get a bundle with two excellent Elixir courses from PragmaticStudio.com.
cultofmetatron
this, my startup's backend is elixir. really simplified making thing distributed from the get go. phoenix is just an amazing framework for building webapps anyway.
stephenwithav
Erlang/OTP is great for distributed coding, but how well does Phoenix integrate with AWS/GCP?
cultofmetatron
ec2 is just vps. you can put whatever you want on it. my startup uses eks (aws) with some extra tuning. for one, you need to allocate one container per vps as the beam likes to grab all the cores. there's also the additional network configs to make sure the nodes can discover each other. swarm has tooling for this. I won't say its easy but its doable and pretty resilient once you have it up an running.
arrowsmith
If you already know Rails you can learn Elixir and Phoenix from my course Phoenix on Rails - I'm currently offering a $7.10 discount to celebrate the release of Rails 7.1 if you use the code RAILS71.

https://phoenixonrails.com

rahimnathwani
If you're going to learn Elixir, start with Exercism (free) and Coding Gnome (cheap).
eatonphil
Not for OP but for others (since it's above the budget), take a David Beazley course. $1500 and write your own implementation of Raft. Learning more about distributed systems is really one of the best investments you could make as a backend engineer. It's the tech that powers distributed systems like Kubernetes (via Etcd), Consul, Vault, Elasticsearch, Redpanda, Cockroach, Yugabyte, etc.

And you'll have to figure out race conditions, deadlocks, and other fun challenges.

https://dabeaz.com/courses.html

manifoldgeo
I took his Build a Compiler in Python course, and I honestly found it to be lackluster.

He had just changed the format, though, and our class was his first of a new wave where he supplied us with no example code, instead making us write it all out by hand.

By the end of the five-day course, virtually no one had a working toy compiler of any kind. Maybe a parser and AST representation, but not the whole shebang.

His style of teaching is not as compelling as his live, on-stage presentations, in my opinion.

If I had paid with my own money, I would've been pissed. Caveat emptor.

eatonphil
I have heard good things about his courses, but it's good to hear your perspective too.

https://vikramoberoi.com/compilers-with-david-beazly-a-recur...

But most importantly this thread is about what to do with an educational budget.

And even if he's not a great teacher, spending money to be forced to think about a problem sounds pretty effective.

Like how a paid meetup has a higher percentage of people showing up who RSVP-ed than does a free meetup.

If it were your own money I wouldn't suggest the $1500 fee to everyone so lightly, I agree.

yla92
I took the same course around towards the end of 2021. David provided examples and I found that he hit a good balance of "I will let you figure out yourself based on these" vs "let me explain you guys what it's about".

I struggled a bit at the last few days, partially because I was taking the course from the other side of the world (i.e had to stay awake all nights for the course, five days).

However, most of us at least managed the "Function" part. The LLVM and WASM parts, I just watch what David did and didn't attempt them myself.

I also took the SICP course, which I found it to be a better "bang for the bucks". Either way, I have no regret about taking David's courses.

theusus
Go for books. Also, checkout teachyourselfcs.com
paulgb
Hussein Nasser's courses are incredible (and criminally cheap if you use the discount codes on his site).

I've done the Fundamentals of Networking and Introduction to Database Engineering and recommend them. You can look up his content on YouTube to see if you like his instruction style, he's prolific there as well.

https://www.husseinnasser.com/p/courses.html

jjackson5324
These are mostly learning resources rather than certifications....

For backend engineering specific, some free & paid resources are

- O'Reilly Membership - This is a gold mine. For the $400 I believe you can purchase a yearly membership, where you get access to the entire O'Reilly catalogue. Designing Data Intensive Applications is included of course. They also have some video courses & conference talks in addition to the books. If you don't want to spend the $400 then they also offer a 7 day trial and don't ask for a credit card....

- quastor.org is a good read (but it's free). They follow all the big tech engineering blogs and send summaries of the interesting backend-dev blog posts.

- bytebytego - this is also free. It's mostly diagrams and provides a very high level overview but it's a good subscription. You can also purchase their books on their website.

- LeetCode membership - good for interview prep if you're looking for a FAANG-job, pretty much useless for everything else (could be helpful if you like competitive coding though!).

- Udemy Courses by Hussein Nasser - I really liked his course on databases. Delves into the different database engines, tradeoffs, query optimization, etc. He also has a YouTube channel with lots of free content.

- codecrafters - I haven't done this myself but it's a bunch of interesting challenges where you build a toy version of Redis, build a bittorrent client, build a toy version of Git, etc. Could be useful to understand how tech works. In terms of a free version, there's also (https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x) which is a collection of blog posts where you're building different things in various languages.

clumsysmurf
> O'Reilly Membership ...

I've had mine for 2 years and have noticed in the past 6 mos or so, the rate of added books is really slowing down to a trickle. I used to check every day to see whats news, now I'm checking once a week. I'm waiting on stuff that was published months ago to show up in their catalog. I'm wondering if the other publishers (Manning, etc) are focusing on their own platforms. But its the only place to get the O'Reilly books.

Not sure whats going on here.

jjackson5324
Interesting. I've noticed that they have a lot of books in "early release", so they're half-done.

But yeah, even despite that, I still think it's a good deal just for the back catalogue.

clumsysmurf
The O'Reilly pipeline seems normal, its the stuff from other publishers ...
realprimoh
Big fan of Quastor and ByteByteGo.

Some other resources I've found really helpful, especially as I've moved towards a backend/systems-heavy role at my job.

- roadmap.sh has a lot of resources that may help you figure out where gaps in your backend knowledge are.

- TLDR Web Dev is an useful daily resource for the latest articles and trends in software engineering.

- engineerscodex.com writes great articles about real-world software engineering, such as how Instagram scaled so much with a small team.

ksherlock
> O'Reilly Membership

Check your local library; mine has free O'Reilly access. ACM used to (maybe still does?) offer O'Reilly access as well, but it was a limited subset.

t-s
+1 to codecrafters. I signed up after seeing this post and the folks behind it are already engaged and interested in feedback, a good sign!
jupp0r
I got GCP certified for Cloud Architect and Data Engineer in the past and it's been actually super helpful to get a rough overview what products they offer and how to connect them together to solve (hypothetical) real world problems.

I don't regret doing it, but don't see the benefit in maintaining the certificates on their renewal schedule.

The certs themselves won't help you at all, it's really the things you learn along the way. There was also a cool "Cloud Architect" sweater that I'm still wearing that they threw in :)

speakspokespok
Came here to say this as well.

Great for learning the product and how to use them, and get the cert to prove to yourself you know the material.

I’d put the cert on LinkedIn but I’d be hesitant to put any on my resume.

Yoric
FWIW, I'm a staff backend engineer, I've been involved in hiring many times and I've never paid attention to certifications.
mongol
I don't have CKAD, but it seems to prove more practical skills than theoretical skills. I think it has value.
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fabianhjr
Some good options might be

- LPIC-1 for Linux (More Ops)

- CKAD (Kubernetes / DevOps)

- Security+ (Security certs are slightly more useful/requiered for DevSecOps or AppSec)

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TimSchumann
If you're just looking to become a better programmer, I'd recommend checking out Execute Program by Gary Bernhardt.

https://www.executeprogram.com/courses

Built in spaced repetition and covers a wide variety of concepts I think would be useful to you even in DevOps back end stuff, even if the language isn't specifically one you're using.

Ms-J
Invest the $400 into learning using either cloud offerings or physical hardware. Certifications are usually a waste of time.