💗 How do you know when you’re starting to specialize, even if your title hasn’t changed?

A few signs:

1. People consistently come to you for the same type of problem
You’re becoming the person with deeper context in that area.

2. You’re making more decisions, not just completing tasks
You’re deciding how the work should happen, what gets prioritized, or when something needs escalation.

3. You’re creating processes other people start using
Documentation, workflows, templates, reporting, tooling.

4. You’re training or guiding other people in that area
Your knowledge is starting to become useful beyond your own workload.

5. You’re spending more of your time solving one category of problems
That can be useful when updating your CV or thinking about your next role.

Your title might still be broad, but the work underneath it may already be showing where your strongest specialization is developing.

💗 Protocol upgrades are a good place to learn what infrastructure jobs actually involve.

When a major blockchain change goes live, look beyond the headline and check who needs to do something differently.

For example:

» Protocol engineers
Design and implement changes at the network level.

» Validator / node operators
Upgrade clients, prepare infrastructure, monitor the rollout, and make sure their systems stay compatible.

» Infrastructure engineers
Work with RPCs, data streams, reliability, monitoring, and other services applications depend on.

» Indexing / data teams
Check whether changes to blocks, timestamps, finality, or network data affect the way information is collected and processed.

» Developer tooling teams
Make sure builders can correctly detect, test, and work with the upgraded network.

This week’s Alpenglow activation on Solana is a good real-world example: most application developers didn’t need a migration, while validators and some downstream infrastructure had more specific changes to prepare for.

If infrastructure interests you as a career path, upgrade documentation can be surprisingly useful reading.

It shows the actual work behind keeping a blockchain running while the underlying system changes.