Learn by Role

You build the part people actually touch. Structure and style a page, make it work on a phone and a screen reader, then keep it fast as the app grows.

Day to dayTurning designs into components, arguing about state, and chasing the one bug that only happens on Safari.

Also calledUI Developer · Web Developer · Client-side Engineer

Start the roadmap

You build what the front end talks to. Data models, APIs, authentication, and the decisions about storage and scale that are expensive to reverse.

Day to dayDesigning an endpoint, working out why a query got slow, and deciding what happens when the third-party service is down.

Also calledServer-side Engineer · API Developer

Start the roadmap

You own a feature end to end — the screen, the endpoint, the table behind it, and the deploy. Breadth over depth, which suits smaller teams and startups.

Day to dayShipping a whole feature yourself, and switching context more often than anyone else on the team.

Also calledProduct Engineer · Generalist

Start the roadmap

You build for a device with a battery, a flaky connection and an app store between you and your users. You cannot hotfix a phone the way you hotfix a server.

Day to dayBuilding screens, handling the connection dropping mid-request, and waiting on store review.

Also calledAndroid Developer · iOS Developer · App Developer

Start the roadmap

You work to a frame budget. One of the few fields where the constant factor genuinely matters and cache behaviour is a design concern.

Day to dayTuning a mechanic until it feels right, then finding the sixteen milliseconds you need back.

Also calledGameplay Programmer · Engine Programmer

Start the roadmap

You put models into production. Increasingly that means building on top of large models rather than training your own, and being the person who knows why the output changed.

Day to dayEvaluating a model, wiring it into a service, and explaining why last week's prompt no longer works.

Also calledMachine Learning Engineer · Applied Scientist

Start the roadmap

You answer questions the business cannot answer by looking. Statistics and experiment design matter more here than any model, and are what separate the role from an analyst.

Day to dayDesigning an experiment, finding the confound, and telling someone senior their idea did not work.

Also calledResearch Scientist · Product Data Scientist

Start the roadmap

You turn business questions into answers other people act on. The most approachable way into data work, and the one where communication counts most.

Day to dayPulling the numbers, working out why two dashboards disagree, and presenting the result.

Also calledBI Analyst · Business Analyst · Insights Analyst

Start the roadmap

You build the pipelines everyone else depends on. Closer to backend engineering than to analysis, with a nightly deadline and a lot of other people's assumptions resting on you.

Day to dayFixing the job that failed at 03:00, and backfilling a day of data without corrupting yesterday.

Also calledAnalytics Engineer · ETL Developer

Start the roadmap

You make shipping boring. Pipelines, infrastructure described in code, and the containers everything runs in — so releases stop being events.

Day to dayCutting deploy time, unbreaking a pipeline, and removing a manual step nobody admits doing.

Also calledPlatform Engineer · Build Engineer

Start the roadmap

You design and run what everything else sits on. One provider learned properly, described in code, with the identity and cost decisions that quietly define both the security posture and the bill.

Day to dayReviewing a Terraform change, tightening a permission, and explaining an invoice.

Also calledAWS Engineer · Cloud Architect · Infrastructure Engineer

Start the roadmap

Software engineering applied to operations. The distinction from a sysadmin is that you automate the toil away rather than absorbing it, and you agree in advance how much downtime is acceptable.

Day to dayWriting the automation that ends a recurring page, and running the postmortem when it fires anyway.

Also calledProduction Engineer · Reliability Engineer

Start the roadmap

You find the assumption that fails. Mostly not exploitation — mostly noticing, containing, and writing down what happened so it does not happen twice.

Day to dayReviewing a design for the attack nobody modelled, and triaging whether the alert is real.

Also calledAppSec Engineer · Security Analyst · Penetration Tester

Start the roadmap

You decide what good enough means and prove it. Automation is software, so a suite nobody can maintain is worse than no suite at all.

Day to dayExploring a feature for the case nobody specified, and stopping a flaky test being ignored.

Also calledSDET · Test Engineer · Automation Engineer

Start the roadmap

You make the decisions other people live with for a decade. Not an entry point — it needs delivery experience, because architecture without it produces diagrams nobody can implement.

Day to dayWriting the decision down, and persuading three teams the trade-off is worth it.

Also calledPrincipal Engineer · Technical Lead

Start the roadmap

You write code that cannot be patched after deployment, holding assets that cannot be clawed back. Security is not a phase of this job, it is the job.

Day to dayWriting a contract, then trying to break it before someone else does.

Also calledSmart Contract Engineer · Web3 Developer

Start the roadmap

Not a job title — the foundation under all of them. Operating systems, networks, databases and theory, in the order a degree teaches them.

Day to dayThe material that stays true after the framework you learned this year is gone.

Also calledComputer Science · The degree, condensed

Start the roadmap

The path through data structures and algorithms in the order that works, then the practice and interview rounds that turn it into an offer.

Day to daySolving by pattern rather than by novelty, and redoing the ones you failed.

Also calledCoding Interview Prep · LeetCode Prep

Start the roadmap