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What has helped me most over the years is working in smaller companies, where you necessarily need to take on more responsabilities.

My first job ~2005 was at a small shop with like 4-5 people and around 20 physical servers under our control and the same amount on-premise with clients (mix of Windows Servers, Linux distros and BSDs). We did have a sys admin person, but he was only responsible for the servers themselves and the base configuration. Everything application related running on it was our responsilibity as developers.

And after that, in the following jobs and as a freelancer, there were I wide variety of things I had to ramp up on quickly. Different build processes, application monitoring, backups, different cloud providers, hidden costs, etc.

Also I have been keeping a "Today I Learned" journal, where I just put small comments and snippets. It is hardly ever any deep insight, but for the most part "to do x in framework y solution z worked". It is also mostly a write-only journal. Just writing things down helps a lot with memory.




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