thanassis j.

Be flexible, be agile in your personal and professional life. Don't be afraid to learn new things and step outside of your confort zone BUT with reason. Reason can be a career path or just money. Does Go belongs to your career path? Does Go belongs to your company's toolset? Do yo seek for new job oportunities? Some people follow a complete career path by using a single language i.e, PHP or java, but if you want to standout in the crowd this is not enough. You already know PHP. This is an oportunity to learn something new. In general, I would advise you to learn at least one language & library/framework per stack . This will help you to lead a team someday.

I don't believe that you are confident about your decision to follow a career path as a developer. This migh be your department's fault and not necessarily yours. Most good developers are already working as developers at that age. Although your current status states that you are an intern you are struggling to find a good starting point. Since you are interested in website developmnet you can start learning programming using a mainstream CMS such as wordpress. Do you know how many companies and self employed guys make their living by customizing wordpess? But if you want to step out of the crowd then seek for junior jobs on a fintech or on a vertical market such as travel or betting. Search for online job oportunities and find out what technologies these guys use then take an online course and start learning the language. Within a month or two apply for a job as a junior and use as reference the online course.

As a general rule of thumb I would say to you to put your transactional data where they belong and take advantage of ACID capabilities whereas use a noSql for sort lived data or big binary files (i.e, logs, uploaded pdf or word files) . Use a good ORM for your relational database schema and a good ODM for your nosql. Avoid putting short lived data in your relational database. Take advantage of TTL and automated document deletion of your nosql for your short lived data. Create collections based on time (i,e. month) and be able to archive them and regain storage space. If you fond of mysql prefer mariaDB which is optimized for speed and it can be horizontally scaled ( clustered). DDL commands are safe and fast and you don't have to worry for huge table alterations. For nosql prefer a solution that can be horizontally scalled (clustered) and reliable TTL out of the box such as couchbase or mongodb. Use both relational and nosql. These technologies are not and will never be mutual exclusive.

Most employers don't expect from you to know how to implement CI/CD or any other funcy stuff. As junior developer you should focus on building a good toolset of good software practices & principles. Your soft skills are important as well. Learn about soft skills. Be eager to learn, be humble and show you talent and your creativity through your work. If you want to become a good developer ( at first) and a star engineer (at a later stage) then computer programming (coding) is your number one priority . Coding is like painting. Putting aside your talent, you have to practice a lot and improve your outcome each time. As junior developer you can learn how to write good code by studying existing code found in public git repositories (i e , github). As junior developer you should study some good software principles (i.e., DRY, KISS, YAGNI) and always recall them each time you write software code. As junior developer you should learn about coding standards and conventions. You will have to follow to your company's coding conventions (soon or later) as well as you will realize that you have to write code cosistent to the existing code base. At the end of the day, code consistency matters a lot. You have to improve your code day by day. If you manage to follow some good software practices you will find out that you will need an ORM to work with your database. Then you will realize that you need the X web framework to build your REST API etc. To sum up, you will start building a toolset with a single programming language and some good software practices & principles and then you will put new tools in it day-by-day.

Seek for those non functional requirements you need to fulfill. Using different database schemes per e-commerce will provide you, among others, better scalability and security. Although you might think that maintenability might drop due to frequent schema updates you can drop this cost to the bare minimum if you manage to automate this process.