Please STOP Building CRUD Projects (Common Dev Mistake)
TThe Coding Koala
Computing/SoftwareAdult EducationInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00so i've been working as a software developer for about three years now and honestly the thing i
00:00:05regret the most is that in my first two years i spent all my time focusing on the wrong thing
00:00:10and since i cannot go back and fix my mistakes you can the problem with most people is that
00:00:15they keep building the same crud application over and over again thinking they are building
00:00:20different projects but in reality they are just building similar project in different outfits
00:00:26sometimes it's a blog sometimes it's a shopify clone but underneath all of that it's the exact
00:00:31same principle create read update and delete the entry from database and before you start abusing me
00:00:38in the comments i'm not against building crud apps in the beginning that's literally how you learn and
00:00:43it's a fundamental skill that every developer should be able to do with their eyes closed because every
00:00:48software you will ever build relies on this foundation but it becomes a problem when you start getting too
00:00:54comfortable there and never move past it and once you cross that line there's a whole separate
00:00:59universe beyond crud apps that you get to experience the second you step outside your comfort zone and
00:01:04this video is all about how to actually do that i will give you three things you can start doing right
00:01:10away and don't miss the third one because it's the laziest thing on this list and somehow the one that
00:01:15taught me the most but let's start from the top make your existing project production ready and this is
00:01:20the one you can literally start tonight without going anywhere near the internet looking for a new
00:01:25project to build all you have to do is pick something you already built maybe a blog maybe an e-commerce
00:01:31platform and try making it production ready and when i say production ready i mean until now you've only
00:01:37ever focused on making it work now it's time to focus on the stuff that actually matters in the real world
00:01:43things like security performance reliability testing and observability because that's the
00:01:49actual core of a production application so let's take your e-commerce platform as an example right
00:01:54now it just works someone logs in adds a product to their cart pays gets a confirmation email and that's
00:02:01great except you probably never planned about what happens the moment things stop going according to plan
00:02:07that's where security comes in basically hunting for flaws and vulnerabilities in your own app go check
00:02:13if someone could log in as another user just by tweaking a request or if your payment route would
00:02:18happily accept a negative number and basically pay the customer instead of the other way around
00:02:23because trust me someone out there will try exactly that within five minutes of your app going
00:02:27then comes performance put a hundred fake users on your product page at the same time and just watch
00:02:33what happens see what breaks when a hundred people query your database at once because right now your
00:02:38app has only ever been tested by an audience of one very patient person you then there's testing and no
00:02:45clicking around your own app for two minutes before every deploy does not count you need actual
00:02:50automated tests and this will teach you two things at once how to actually write good test cases
00:02:56and how to configure something like a github actions workflow so those tests run automatically on every
00:03:01single change push to your repo because that's how real production workflows operate and finally
00:03:07observability which is just a fancy word for if something breaks at three in the morning can you
00:03:13actually figure out what happened this means proper logging proper metrics and making sure your app can
00:03:19basically tell on itself the moment something goes wrong if you focus on adding these things in your basic crud app
00:03:25project you'll naturally end up learning things like caching rate limiting cues database indexing load
00:03:32balancing and the list goes on do this to just one project seriously just one and you will walk away
00:03:38having learned more about how real systems actually behave than another dozen basic crud apps could ever
00:03:44teach you that brings me to number two and this one's a little more obvious build something genuinely
00:03:50complex and if you're sitting there with no idea what to build just pick an existing tool you already use
00:03:56every day and build it from scratch this is the exact type of project that takes you from being a
00:04:01developer to being an engineer and if you're wondering what that platform is on screen it's called code
00:04:06crafters it basically hands you a bunch of popular real world tools and challenges you to build them from
00:04:12scratch it doesn't give you the code it just gives you the roadmap and you have to figure out the rest
00:04:17yourself i tried it myself and genuinely found it useful links in the description if you want to check it
00:04:23out which brings us to number three and this one's honestly the laziest item on the whole list reading
00:04:29post-mortem reports and no i don't mean post-mortems of an actual moda in tech a post-mortem is just the
00:04:36report a company writes up after something goes seriously wrong big names like github cloudflare
00:04:42all of them publish their mistake publicly for example this right here is cloudflare post-mortem
00:04:47from their outage back in november and inside it you can read the full story what the incident actually
00:04:53was what it impacted what caused it and exactly how they fixed it reading these teaches you how things
00:04:59actually operate inside massive tech companies and trust me you will pick up more from one of
00:05:04these reports than you'd expect read one a week and you can learn about how a single line of code can
00:05:10cause problem in big tech companies and that's pretty much it level up your old project start
00:05:16building one genuinely complex thing and get into the habit of reading post-mortem reports this is
00:05:21basically what i do myself and if you've got something to add to this list drop it in the comments
00:05:26and if you subscribe to my newsletter you'll get a weekly email where i share helpful content for
00:05:31developers just like this i guess that's it for this video if it helped you out show it some love
00:05:37and i'll catch you in the next one