Abdu's Garden

Escaping Web Dev

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tagsselfimprovement, selflearning

2 min read

Intro

I want to escape webdev. I mean it’s fine as a sector (actually it’s very flawed) but I’m bored of making frontends and setting up APIs, I want to code more substantial things, to understand the machine better, to run on the metal…etc.

In my mind there are a few ways to do this. Either find a way to apply your current knowledge of software and computers to find a job outside web dev that hits the nail… Or start learning about other software domains.

I’ve identified the following:

2026 Plans

Focus on developing non-Webdev skills amd explore new and exciting frontiers to become more familiar with computers, low-level programming, embedded systems, etc.

Pillars

  1. Learning Rust: this will be a great tool for native development , desktop apps, command-line tools, etc.
  2. Using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Badgeware, and other kits to get into tinkering and closer to embedded programming.
  3. Projects: I’d like to get around to working on Project Afterlife and find a way to build a PC stats monitoring panel.

Systems & Backend Infrastructure

This is a broad umbrella term for building high performance systems that are relied upon by other systems.

Example: writing a Rust or Go service that acts as a rate‑limiting proxy in front of many microservices, measuring and tuning latency and throughput.

Further breakdowns

High performance backend and distributed systems

This includes low-latency, high-throughput services: exchanges, event pipelines, proxies, auth services, etc.
Very popular with rust and linux, requires working around conurrency, observability, and correctness.

DevOps / infrastructure / platform engineering

Designing CI/CD, deployment pipelines, container platforms, and internal tooling, usually heavy on Linux, shell, CLIs, and automation.

Cloud infrastructure / Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Owning reliability, incident response, and performance of large systems, tuning services, and automating infra with code rather than clicking in dashboards.

Desktop & Native Development

Native development means developing apps natively for the platform or OS on which it runs. However, there are also crossplatform desktop apps, and that’s what’s known as Desktop Development.

Systems Programming

Something closer to the OS and building platforms and systems for other software.

Embedded Systems

Found some good resources and threads on this, also Getting Into Embedded Systems.

Threads

Resources

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