Veteran engineers (10 yrs exp+) advice needed
I&#x27;ve been in my current role for nearly 9 years, working in the field for 12+.  I&#x27;d say that the one piece of advice is to not get stuck to a certain stack if you have the authority to make those decisions.<p>You&#x27;re definitely going to make the wrong decisions about the stack you choose, or the way you design elements of your code, but that is how you learn.<p>Good problems to have, like scaling to thousands of concurrent requests, have been the greatest opportunities to learn.  You may not get the answers right away, but they will come.<p>Before I get comfortable with learning any new language, look into the best practices for caching, or how easily that is handled.  Your ability to know how and when to cache whether it&#x27;s in memory if the language you use supports that, or through memcached&#x2F;redis is going to make it less likely that you&#x27;re going to need to do a complete rewrite in the future.<p>I first started programming 20+ years ago before I was 10 years old, with Visual Basic and the demo.  Eventually moving to access, and PHP in the early 2000&#x27;s in my later years in high school.  Today, some of the larger apps I&#x27;ve written have been written in Go.  Lately in the last few weeks, I&#x27;ve really come to love Ruby&#x2F;Ruby on Rails, and for apps that I don&#x27;t need to scale, that is going to be my go-to language for my own projects and client projects.<p>Would I suggest we rewrite everything or utilize Rails in my day job? Not a chance, because 1) my productivity is not worth it and 2) it&#x27;s not the right tool for the job.  Maybe if we had to write some back office software I&#x27;d recommend it, or I&#x27;d use Sinatra for a basic API&#x2F;demo.