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Ask HN: Best Tech Courses/Certifications Under $400 for a Back End Engineer?
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!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- brian_herman 3y agoTerraform Associate is $70 and a good cert for backend engineering.
- jumpman500 3y agoI 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 3y agoHighly 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 3y agowhich AWS certs are these in particular? Is worth considering other certs e.g. gcp, azure for the same reason?
- anyoneamous 3y agoSolutions 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoI thought the Developer and Solutions Architect were both a complete waste of time compared to actual day to day work with AWS.
- oceanplexian 3y agoI 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoIndeed, 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.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI 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 3y agoIt’s probably an L&D stipend
- dev_0 3y ago[dead]
- Bognar 3y agoMid-level backend engineer? Buy the book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and read it.
- eatonphil 3y agoCame here to say this. :)
- arrowsmith 3y agoSeconded - this book is fantastic. I wish I'd read it much earlier in my career.
- OJFord 3y agoI would also go for books, but if OPs here asking for courses they probably know they learn better that way/prefer it.
- coffee_ 3y agoI’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 3y agoThere's an audiobook too, if that's your style.
- utopcell 3y agoAn 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 3y agoCerts 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 3y agoSome 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 3y agoI'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 3y agoWhich AWS Cert in particular?
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 3y agoSolution 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 3y agoI’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 3y agothis, 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 3y agoErlang/OTP is great for distributed coding, but how well does Phoenix integrate with AWS/GCP?
- cultofmetatron 3y agoec2 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 3y agoIf 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 https://phoenixonrails.com
- rahimnathwani 3y agoIf you're going to learn Elixir, start with Exercism (free) and Coding Gnome (cheap).
- eatonphil 3y agoNot 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 https://dabeaz.com/courses.html
- manifoldgeo 3y agoI 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 3y agoI have heard good things about his courses, but it's good to hear your perspective too. https://vikramoberoi.com/compilers-with-david-beazly-a-recursive-descent-into-madness-and-delight/ 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoGo for books. Also, checkout teachyourselfcs.com
- paulgb 3y agoHussein 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 https://www.husseinnasser.com/p/courses.html
- jjackson5324 3y agoThese 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 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoInteresting. 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.
- honksillet 3y agohttps://learn.mongodb.com/learning-paths/introduction-to-mongodb https://learn.mongodb.com/learning-paths/introduction-to-mon... I liked this mongoDB course I took a few years ago. And it is free.
- hereforcomments 3y agohttps://frontendmasters.com/ https://frontendmasters.com/ (They have backend courses as well)
- patmorgan23 3y agoBoot.dev is a good backend focused option too
- jupp0r 3y agoI 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 3y agoCame 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 3y agoFWIW, I'm a staff backend engineer, I've been involved in hiring many times and I've never paid attention to certifications.
- mongol 3y agoI don't have CKAD, but it seems to prove more practical skills than theoretical skills. I think it has value.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kappapilla 3y agospend time ( is money) on these --https://fly.io/blog/gossip-glomers/ https://fly.io/blog/gossip-glomers/
- fabianhjr 3y agoSome 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)
- TimSchumann 3y agoIf you're just looking to become a better programmer, I'd recommend checking out Execute Program by Gary Bernhardt. https://www.executeprogram.com/courses 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.
- byyoung3 3y agoyoutube
- whyfor_butToBe 3y ago[dead]
- axpy906 3y agoAWS Certified Data Engineer: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-data-engineer-associate/ https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-data-engineer...
- yla92 3y agoThings that I recommend to my team when it comes to learning funds like this (aside from what else have been recommended) - JetBrains IDE (personal) https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/?section=personal&billing=yearly https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/?section=personal&billing... - All Products US $289.00 - Courses from https://www.educative.io/explore https://www.educative.io/explore - Coursera Plus https://www.coursera.org/courseraplus https://www.coursera.org/courseraplus
- anotheruser13 3y agoNot sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but it's worth checking: https://www.aboutamazon.com/aws/news/aws-cloud-institute-virtual-training-for-cloud-developers https://www.aboutamazon.com/aws/news/aws-cloud-institute-vir...
- Ms-J 3y agoInvest the $400 into learning using either cloud offerings or physical hardware. Certifications are usually a waste of time.
- masteruvpuppetz 3y agoI passed Azure Data Engineer but I have zero IT experience. Been an accounting guy all my life. So no value for me passing the Azure Data Engineer. I'm focusing on Python Data Analysis now so let's see :)
- wagslane 3y agoYuuuge disclaimer: I made it, but Boot.dev is a collection of game-like interactive courses focused on backend web dev. It's all in Python and go for the most part. I will say I don't think certs are a big deal, and they wouldn't be the reason for doing Boot.dev. Its all about learning the concepts and putting it into practice by building cool stuff
- psykomal 3y agoThe Empowered Programmer Cohort (https://www.empoweredcoder.com https://www.empoweredcoder.com) seems like a good fit here. I think the syllabus more than justifies the investment (under your budget). I am currently attending this and learning distributed systems from a low-level perspective (think Compare-and-Swap, Lock-free Data Structues, KV Store, Raft, etc) and has been really awesome so far.
- sid1729 3y agoCurrently am doing a cohort which is by empoweredcoder.com he teaches protocols multithreading parallelism distributed system and much more and the best part which I like the most is the connection and people i have met there and they are really amazing. You learn by doing and by colaborating.