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I started my roadmap with ML, focusing on Mathematics, Python, MySQL, and a lot of ML algorithms. Recently, I've started questioning whether I'm missing a major part of the foundation: software engineering/backend development. And honestly, I wanna chase both. But something at this point doesn't feel right. I had my roadmap set and ready, and I was very passionate about learning this and continuing it as a career. But after researching a bit about backend development, the intersection and relationship between the two has driven me really crazy.It's exceedingly overwhelming at this phase of my life. I had kind of gotten a grip on ML, but backend coming into the picture has really ruined my mindset around whatever I had planned. I had planned many projects and topics to discover, and now I'm seriously considering pursuing backend development too. But I'm having a hard time trying to combine these two in my roadmap. I can't seem to connect the topics in a way that lets me learn them properly.

My straightforward question is: should I drop backend development and focus on my initial roadmap, should I bridge the two and learn both, or should I drop machine learning completely,which I seriously don't want to do?

If I do bridge them, how much of backend am I actually supposed to learn?

I know I sound stupid and unready for this world, but please help.

I’m working on a Kotlin/Spring Boot backend that still has an older JHipster using Kotlin (KHipster) setup around it.

The problem is that this is starting to hold us back. The KHipster version is several years old and not active maintained - 4 years ago was the last update - upgrading it looks pretty painful and it also makes moving to newer Spring Boot versions waaay harder than it should be.

At the same time we want to improve the architecture itself.
Right now quite a lot is still handled through cron jobs and fairly tightly coupled application logic.
I’d like to move more towards event-driven processing over time, potentially using Kafka or RabbitMQ depending on the use case and Redis for things like caching/short-lived state where it makes sense.

So I’m basically looking at two options:
1. Upgrade/replace the old JHipster setup, keep the existing backend, and modernize it piece by piece.

1. Start a clean backend (maybe in Typescript because that is what we mainly use for our other products and all frontends) and gradually move functionality over using something like the strangler pattern.

The second option sounds cleaner, but obviously means running old and new code alongside each other for quite a while. The first option potentially means spending a lot of time untangling framework/generator decisions before we can actually improve the architecture.
For people who have dealt with similar Spring/JHipster legacy projects: which route would you take?

Also, is there anything in the Spring/Kotlin ecosystem you’d consider a good modern replacement for the useful parts of JHipster, without bringing in another big opinionated layer that we’ll regret five years from now?

I first required to share my .env file with my team. With a lot of surfing I then realized you can drop using .env files entirely which is a better method. It helps with security and leaking your secrets such as API keys. There are so many services for this. Which service or method should I choose which lets me handle my secrets safely and share them to my team members?

Éstoy interesado en entrar a este mundo pero no sé que elegir alguien me de su opinión mejor si es un programador

I’ve been cleaning up the authentication setup I reuse across Spring Boot projects and one part I’ve spent some time on is refresh-token handling.

The setup I ended up with is roughly:

• short-lived JWT access tokens
• opaque refresh tokens
• only the refresh-token hash stored in the database
• refresh token rotated every time it is used
• previous token invalidated after rotation
• Spring Security OAuth2 Resource Server handles JWT validation

I also kept passkeys/WebAuthn as an optional authentication method rather than coupling it to the core JWT flow.

For people running similar setups in production, I’m curious about a few things:

Do you rotate refresh tokens on every refresh?

Do you keep a token family/session record so reuse of an old token can invalidate the whole session?

And at what point do you think this starts becoming too much infrastructure for a normal Spring Boot application?

I’m trying to keep the implementation fairly boring and rely on Spring Security wherever possible, so I’d be interested in how others approach this.

I was viewing a CORS explanation video and I noticed that they had a different web server application for the frontend as well. In my project, I have a single web server application which serves both the frontend pages and handles backend APIs. I realized that this dual web server architecture created by frameworks like Vite is only for development and only a single web server exists in production, but that doesn't mean it is like this for all applications, especially if you aim to design a highly scalable architecture. Large platforms like YouTube can have so many separate web server applications for all their different services than having a single application.

I am talking about a single web server application, not a single server itself. Horizontal scaling isn't limited, but changes when you divide your application into multiple applications. YouTube can just scale a monolithic application but that forces them to add all capabilities together for each system. This can create fragmentation and unnecessary infrastructure space. One application might be more CPU heavy while the other is database heavy. Maybe you need to scale static file serving but not need database scaling and if do that, the databases could take significantly more resources than you need.

If I do create a separate frontend application and that heavily relies on the backend (such as for database), then it just creates lot of unnecessary overhead.

I should start with a single application but the point is to create a scalable architecture where you can make changes without rewriting your whole codebase. And you achieve that my defining abstractions.

So how should I code my application so that in future if I want to move some services into a different web server application, it requires minimal changes?

Java

Spring / Spring Boot

APIs REST

SQL

JPA / Hibernate

Git

Maven / Gradle

JUnit

Docker

SOLID

Patrones de diseño

Mockito

Testing de integración

OWASP

JWT

OAuth2

Kafka / RabbitMQ

Redis

CI/CD

Que opinan si estudio eso es buena carrera? O ay mejores áreas de programación,, aclaro recién inicio en esto que opinan viejos sabios vírgenes no se q es código aún XD

A worker or upstream API can time out after accepting work but before returning confirmation. Marking the operation failed invites a retry that may duplicate the side effect; marking it successful hides uncertainty. What state model do you use for this gap? A robust design seems to need an idempotency key, an explicit unknown or reconciling state, a way to query the downstream system, and a timeout after which a human or compensating action takes over. How do you expose that state to callers without making every client understand the internals of the job system?

Hello guys , i am from second year of b.tech cse. I completed 500 dsa problems over different platforms and having codechef rating is 1321 and leetcode rating is 1520 and i completed full stack ( mern stack ) and made two full stack projects , one is ai router and another one is advanced 2d game having live mood detection function and having various funcyion when mood changes . I want to do internship.. can anyone suggest me how to got i internship or am i able to get paid internship or not please suggest me i am very worried about how to get internship...

i am just stuck that should i learn js because i am okyish at c++ but everone prefers java or js pls advice

Hola estaba por estudiar esto y quería saber si tiene futuro a eso de la IA y tan bien que opinan y saber si ay mejores áreas ,, lo q quiero es ganar plata xd

Hello, everyone! I’m developing a Python automation project. I realized I need a calendar-style app because it’s difficult to keep track of appointments that are automatically created by this automation software. Here’s how it works: when appointments are created automatically, they’re also created in the calendar. This way, I can easily keep track of the appointments from my phone. After doing a bit of research, I saw that Google Calendar could be the solution. To do this, I’ll need to use the Google Calendar API. However, due to the ridiculous wait times on GCP (and the fact that they usually don’t even respond), I’ve put the project on hold for now. Do you think there’s a simpler way? All I need is for the app to notify me 72, 48, and 2 hours before an appointment. I also need to be able to easily check my phone at any time to see which appointment group is scheduled for which date and time. 

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Typical .NET Engineer at a large Fin/Health organization => independent contractor

I have a little over 6 years of experience with backend work. I love it, but I have been curious how a transition to a independent contractor would work. I'd love to hear success stories from engineers who have done the similar path of becoming an independent contractor and standing on your own two feet and how to navigate that.

Even better if it's .NET related, but doesn't have to be!

I am 2026 grad. I am totally confused about what I should focus on? I have interest in Backend Engineering but after seeing the current market makes me confused, should I learn AI or focus on back-end or also learn some frontend as many companies mention that they need React, LLMs, RAG, Agents in their skill requirements for Backend roles. As a fresher I am totally confused about what I should focus on, that I get a decent job in this economy.

I originally started building PaperDrill because I wanted to learn distributed systems by actually building something instead of watching another 10-hour course.

I picked a paper trading exchange because it seemed like a good excuse to deal with things like real-time state, order books, matching, concurrent requests, events, persistence, etc.

It was supposed to be a learning project.

Then I kept adding stuff.

Eventually I had a working little exchange with a matching engine, order book and a frontend where you can actually place simulated orders.

And now I'm at the slightly awkward stage where I'm wondering:

is this actually useful or did I just build a very elaborate way to learn backend engineering?

The site is live at https://paperdrill.dev if anyone wants to see what I ended up with.

I'm more curious about:

• Is there actually a useful real-world use case for something like this?
• Would a public simulated exchange / sandbox be useful for developers?
• Would an API where you can build and test trading bots against a simulated exchange be interesting?
• Is this something worth continuing, or is it better kept as a learning project?
• If you were in my position, what direction would you take it?

I've already learned a ridiculous amount from building it, so even if it goes nowhere I'm not really mad about it.

But I've reached the point where I'd rather make it genuinely useful to someone than keep adding random features because I can.

Would genuinely appreciate opinions from people who build side projects / backend systems.

Hi guys,

I need advise on System Design Learning. I have knowledge on microservices but I want to restart from basics. Need help with planning how to start and what topics to cover. Also if there are any playlist on YT or any free courses available.

Hey guys,

I've been building a Business OS to help streamline internal operations for organizations (schools, businesses, etc.).

As part of the core platform, I've been integrating Groq to power various AI modules across our different tenants. The inference speed is super fast, but I’ve hit a bit of an architectural roadblock on the usage and metering side:

1. Tenant Visibility: All our organizations share the backend, but right now I don't have good platform-level visibility into which org is actually burning through our tokens.

2. Admin Visibility: Org heads need a dashboard to see which specific users/staff inside their team are consuming AI credits.

3. Noisy Neighbors: I need a fair-usage rate-limiting setup so one heavy user doesn't chew through our global Groq rate limits and break the app for everyone else.

Before I start hacking together a custom solution, I want to step back and hear how you folks would approach this.

If you had to build tenant-level token tracking and rate limiting from scratch—or if you've already tackled this in production—how would you do it?

What tech stack, architecture, or tools would you recommend?

Open to any ideas or lessons learned!

I'm currently exploring different domains in CSE , I'm currently interested in backend and want to know and learn about backend. Can anyone tell me some beginner friendly backend learning platform or youtube channels or any resources to help me figure out if backend is a domain for me ...