This may sound counterintuitive, but in the era of AI, less is more. AI can help anyone write code faster, but it can't replace an understanding of how production systems actually work. The competitive advantage isn't knowing more tools—it's understanding the fundamentals that every production application is built on. Mastering those fundamentals may be the way to do more with less.
Every good basketball coach will tell you the same thing: you have to work on the fundamentals every day. That’s exactly what the Production Engineering MLH Fellowship is designed to do: teach you how to maintain systems from scratch. It teaches you how to get a good grasp on the fundamentals and how to expand on any and all areas should you choose to.
The material builds on itself week after week pretty seamlessly. Although you may not leave the fellowship being an expert in any particular field—Docker, testing, or Linux—it does give you the fundamentals to expand on each subject later on.
For example, say that you want to become an expert in testing. After the fellowship, you’ll understand: That same pattern applies throughout the fellowship. You may not master every topic, but you’ll leave with the foundation needed to go much deeper into any of them.
This fellowship is also ideal for engineers in two situations: experienced engineers who have not done much infrastructure or DevOps, and engineers finishing college who have had a strong focus on software engineering but haven’t launched applications to production.
From experience, the process of launching a small application and the process of launching a big application have a lot of overlap. For bigger applications, the checklist is bigger, and there may be more abstraction and boilerplate, but the overall essence is the same. That is exactly what we are learning here: the essence of how every production application works, regardless of language or infrastructure. AI will continue to change the tools we use, but those underlying principles remain the same. Once you understand those fundamentals, the tools and technologies become much easier to learn.
If you are interested and would like to learn more, follow MLH on LinkedIn.