Best Tech Courses/Certifications Under $400 for a Back End Engineer?

I don't think tech courses or certificates have ever been a top consideration when reviewing backend engineer qualifications. Only if we're hiring for a specific technology that's niche. Most certificates just teach you how to understand/sell a specific technology stack which sometimes is helpful, but other times can make you not see simpler solutions. I'd check out what's freely available first.

Your 400 dollars is probably better spent making mistakes building your own personal project on aws/or some other cloud provider.

Mid-level backend engineer? Buy the book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" and read it.

Certs just aren't that important anymore, but if anything, I'd do the AWS cert.

If you just want to improve your skills, a few good Udemy courses will take your far if you follow along.

Terraform Associate is $70 and a good cert for backend engineering.

Not for OP but for others, take a Dave Beazley course. $1500 and write your own implementation of Raft. Learning more about distributed systems is really one of the best investments you could make as a backend engineer.

https://dabeaz.com/courses.html

Go for books. Also, checkout teachyourselfcs.com

I’d recommend learning Elixir if your goal is to do a distributed systems project. For around $250 you can get a bundle with two excellent Elixir courses from PragmaticStudio.com.

https://learn.mongodb.com/learning-paths/introduction-to-mon... I liked this mongoDB course I took a few years ago. And it is free.

For backend engineering specific, some free & paid resources are

- O'Reilly Membership - This is a gold mine. For the $400 I believe you can purchase a yearly membership, where you get access to the entire O'Reilly catalogue. Designing Data Intensive Applications is included of course. They also have some video courses & conference talks in addition to the books.

- quastor.org is a good read (but it's free). They follow all the big tech engineering blogs and send summaries of the interesting backend-dev blog posts.

- bytebytego - this is also free. It's mostly diagrams and provides a very high level overview but it's a good subscription. You can also purchase their books on their website.

- LeetCode membership - good for interview prep if you're looking for a FAANG-job, pretty much useless for everything else.

- Udemy Courses by Hussein Nasser - I really liked his course on databases. Delves into the different database engines, tradeoffs, query optimization, etc. He also has a YouTube channel with lots of free content.

- codecrafters - I haven't done this myself but it's a bunch of interesting challenges where you build a toy version of Redis, build a bittorrent client, build a toy version of Git, etc. Could be useful to understand how tech works. In terms of a free version, there's also (https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x) which is a collection of blog posts where you're building different things in various languages.

https://frontendmasters.com/

(They have backend courses as well)

Hussein Nasser's courses are incredible (and criminally cheap if you use the discount codes on his site).

I've done the Fundamentals of Networking and Introduction to Database Engineering and recommend them. You can look up his content on YouTube to see if you like his instruction style, he's prolific there as well.

https://www.husseinnasser.com/p/courses.html

I got GCP certified for Cloud Architect and Data Engineer in the past and it's been actually super helpful to get a rough overview what products they offer and how to connect them together to solve (hypothetical) real world problems.

I don't regret doing it, but don't see the benefit in maintaining the certificates on their renewal schedule.

The certs themselves won't help you at all, it's really the things you learn along the way. There was also a cool "Cloud Architect" sweater that I'm still wearing that they threw in :)

FWIW, I'm a staff backend engineer, I've been involved in hiring many times and I've never paid attention to certifications.

I don't have CKAD, but it seems to prove more practical skills than theoretical skills. I think it has value.

spend time ( is money) on these --https://fly.io/blog/gossip-glomers/

Some good options might be

- LPIC-1 for Linux (More Ops)

- CKAD (Kubernetes / DevOps)

- Security+ (Security certs are slightly more useful/requiered for DevSecOps or AppSec)

If you're just looking to become a better programmer, I'd recommend checking out Execute Program by Gary Bernhardt.

https://www.executeprogram.com/courses

Built in spaced repetition and covers a wide variety of concepts I think would be useful to you even in DevOps back end stuff, even if the language isn't specifically one you're using.

youtube

AWS Certified Data Engineer: https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-data-engineer...