Leveling Up as a Software Engineer – Day 3

On Day 3 of my learning journey, I took a detour from my original DevOps plans and ended up exploring the underlying security of the web, foundational DevOps concepts, and 20 core system design patterns—all in one intense session.

---

🛠️ DevOps: A Beginner’s Dive

Though I had ambitious plans to deploy APIs and UIs using Docker and Kubernetes, the reality was a little different. I ended up starting with the DevOps Beginner path on roadmap.sh. It was eye-opening but admittedly overwhelming—there’s a lot more under the DevOps umbrella than just containers and pipelines.

What stood out to me was how interconnected everything is, from CI/CD to monitoring and infrastructure as code. This gave me a bird’s-eye view, and now I have a better idea of what to deep-dive into next.

---

🔐 SSL/TLS – Why the Web Can Be Trusted

One of the most satisfying parts of the day was understanding how SSL/TLS works and why it's so critical:

• SSL/TLS ensures that data between a client and server is encrypted and secure.

• I learned how certificates work, the role of Certificate Authorities, and how HTTPS makes use of this protocol to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.

• This was a foundational concept that helped me appreciate the invisible security layers we often take for granted when deploying or browsing web applications.

---

🧠 Brain-Bending System Design Concepts

To close the day, I watched Neetcode's "20 System Design Concepts" video on YouTube (link here). It’s only 10 minutes long, but it packs a punch. Some of the concepts covered include:

• Load balancers

• Caching

• Rate limiting

• CAP theorem

• Sharding

• Database replication

⚠️ Warning: The video is dense. It’s like drinking from a firehose, but it's an incredible overview. I definitely recommend revisiting each concept individually later to truly grasp their depth and use cases.

---

🔚 Wrap-Up

Even though I didn’t hit all my original goals, Day 3 was still a major win. Here's what I walked away with:

• A clearer picture of how DevOps fits together

• A deeper understanding of web security through SSL/TLS

• A crash course in key system design patterns that every backend dev should know