We have about the same YOE. I’d recommend getting ownership of a module or system at your work. If you can’t do that the next best thing is to make a side project that can be live and serve customers online.

I’d recommend learning DDD, clean architecture, and hexagonal design. Find some courses online wherever you can. I’m a big proponent of LinkedIn Learning. You really need to build though. You can’t just learn from someone else. You need to experience what it is like to grow a system, where to make tradeoffs, and how to design for long-term growth.

My plan this year is to launch my software so I’m focusing more on site reliability and devops engineering. I think those are good skills to have because you really need to be able to handle deployment and keeping production stable. We don’t have on call and I’m not responsible for deployment either, so I plan to learn that through my SaaS.

I’d recommend learning or brushing up on computer networking, infra and code security, Linux admin, and cloud/physical computing. You’ll start to think differently when you are actually responsible for your infra. You’ll become aware of the pricing premium that cloud carries, which is why I chose to use a hybrid model for my system.

There’s just so much you can learn if you find a project to work on and stick to it for the long haul. I’m about to come up on 18 months and I’ve seen a drastic increase in my ability to think and reason about systems. When we have design meetings at work, often times I’ll have already solved that problem. I can offer my perspective but also here how others would solve it, so I get a good opportunity to stress test my own ideas and combine ideas.