How to think about domain focus?

Question

I know I like backend better than frontend, at least for professional work. I'm starting in a few months as a new grad doing backend Java Spring microservice type work on a platform team. I think I really like that world of big data application architecture, microservices, etc but how do I start to think about the sub-domain that I want to be world class at?

Is it too early in my career to say that I want to be an expert at the backend platform level of data-intensive applications? Or something like that?

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Elliot Kang · Accepted Answer

Hm, platforms for data-intensive applications is still incredibly vague (in the grand scheme of things). Video is different from text or image or logging data.

Maybe you can find something more specific that you can be world-class at. Steve Huynh has a great video on it: https://youtu.be/0kMWWm3BnBQ?si=SS0L3ypYPd9if5zq

This may feel limiting to narrow your focus down, but truly focusing is the only way to become world-class at something. But doesn't focusing on one thing limit the number of jobs you can apply to? Yes, but if you focus on something specific like payments processing, you'll get lots of payments processing interviews. And once you have mastery in one very specific thing, you can quickly gain mastery in adjacent tech stacks.

For example, data consistency is a huge thing in payments processing. Data consistency also happens to be a major issue in distributed systems. You can transfer some of the mastery over so you're never truly at square one again.

How to think about domain focus?

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