One other other thing. Functional thinking has greatly changed the landscape of client-server applications that are hosted in the cloud as well. If your aim is

One other other thing. Functional thinking has greatly changed the landscape of client-server applications that are hosted in the cloud as well. If your aim is apps, maybe don't bother to master the skills needed to set up and maintain a Linux server (although if you follow OP's other suggestions, you're well on your way). Instead, consider your backend as a network of microservices, functions, that each do one thing and do it with side effects only when necessary. The host for your app? Poof! That's AWS/GCP/Azure's problem.