Title: In the course of reading lots of tech news, and occasionally hanging out with other hackers, I've come under the impression that there is some kind of intense, difficult black art to building large services that scale to 10^N number of users, for any impressive value of N.<p>I'm a dev of 20+ years who has worked on everything from games, to desktop apps, to web apps. I worked as a front-end web development lead at Microsoft on several <i>small</i> web apps, and as the back-end dev on a <i>small</i> web service.<p>I think I could get interviews at any number of interesting places, but if I was going for back-end work (the part that interests me), I feel like I would simply be out of my depth. How do I get there? I'm sure there are obvious answers like "read books", "learn on the job", or "try to build youtube/facebook/twitter, and succeed". So specifically, my question is for those who have already learned to build medium-to-large services: what was <i>your</i> path to acquiring these skills, and do you have any advice for people like me?
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