A pm mentioned a funny thing today. It was an off-hand comment about installing an SSL certificate as one of the first things you learn as a dev. I can’t speak to most, but it took me a long time before I needed my first cert. And then it kind of dawned on me all of the things I take for granted now.

When I first started, a server was a scary thing. Give me cPanel and an auto-installer any day of the week. Now I find it hard to relinquish control even to something like Ansible. I’ve learnt what I need to do as I go along. If something breaks, I usually have a pretty good idea of what.

And then there’s the components. Memcached and varnish and queues and load balancers. When I started in this world, these were all semi-mythical things only the big boys used. But now they’re part and parcel. Twenty million requests just means an extra LB here and thinking about how to scale things out horizontally.

Designing systems is where I’ve grown the most. It’s not affordable to start a session on every request. You’ve got to think about tiers of caching, about purges and consistency. If I write this locally, how can I retrieve it elsewhere? If this job executes in parallel, is it going to lead to race conditions?

They’re just things I take for granted, but none of them were things I started with. My little toolbox of hacky scripts has grown into a small detached garage of slightly-less so hacky systems. Now to find that wrench.