Why I’m Learning Restate.dev (And Why You Should Too)

I’m terrified.

Not of AI itself—but of being left behind by it. Of waking up one day and realizing the world moved on without me. That the skills I built my career on are suddenly obsolete. That I’m replaceable.

Maybe you feel it too. That gnawing anxiety when you read another headline about AI replacing jobs. When you see younger developers picking up new frameworks in weeks while you’re still trying to keep up with the last “revolutionary” technology. When you wonder if you’re one bad quarter away from being “restructured” out of existence.

Here’s what I’ve learned: fear is a compass, not a cage.

The Hard Truth About Survival in Tech

The AI revolution isn’t coming—it’s here. And unlike previous tech shifts, this one moves at a pace that makes Moore’s Law look quaint. Studies show that 72% of CHROs expect AI-driven job replacements within three years, and I refuse to be part of that statistic.

But here’s the thing: learning yet another JavaScript framework won’t save us.

What we need are skills that make us irreplaceable. Skills that AI can’t easily replicate. Skills that give us leverage when the next disruption hits.

That’s why I’m betting everything on resilient distributed backend systems built with Go and Restate.dev.

Why Go? Why Distributed Systems? Why Now?

After years of chasing shiny objects, I’ve realized something: the optimal way to learn is the hard way. No more passive tutorial hell. No more copying and pasting code I don’t understand.

Go forces you to think about fundamentals. About concurrency. About building systems that don’t just work—but work at scale, under pressure, when everything else is failing. These are the skills that matter when AI is handling the easy stuff.

And distributed systems? They’re the backbone of every major platform you use. They’re complex enough that AI can’t just “solve” them, but learnable enough that with focus and community support, we can master them.

Restate.dev makes this accessible. It lets us build fault-tolerant, durable systems without drowning in complexity. It’s the bridge between where we are and where we need to be.

My Learning Roadmap (Join Me)

I’m not doing this alone. Here’s my plan, and I’m inviting you to walk this path with me:

Step 1: Set Up Your Foundation

  • Install Linux Mint as your development environment (stable, beginner-friendly, no nonsense)
  • Use gut-cli.dev as your sidekick to Git—because let’s be honest, Git can be intimidating, and we don’t need that friction
  • Open a GitHub account and commit to learning in public
  • Install Kilo Code and Antigravity for a lightweight, focused coding experience

Step 2: Build Your Learning Toolkit

  • Sign up for free tier LLM accounts: Claude, ChatGPT, Kimi, and others. These are your 24/7 learning assistants
  • Create a Medium account to document your journey (writing solidifies learning)
  • Open a Twitter account and follow me at @ibm2100 to join our community

Step 3: Start Building

Step 4: Build Community

This is where magic happens. We’re not just learning alone in our room. We’re building a community of learners, writers, builders, and future experts.

Share your wins. Share your frustrations. Help others when they’re stuck. Write about what you learned today. Build projects that solve real problems.

The Promise: Resilience, Not Just Skills

The primary obstacle companies face with AI isn’t technical—it’s the ability to adapt, reinvent, and scale new ways of working, called change resilience.

That’s what this journey is really about. Not just learning Go or Restate or distributed systems. It’s about building personal resilience. About becoming the kind of developer who can learn anything, adapt to anything, and thrive in uncertainty.

When you can build resilient systems, you become resilient yourself.

Let’s Do This Together

I’m not promising this will be easy. I’m promising it will be worth it.

I’m not promising overnight success. I’m promising that a year from now, you’ll be a different developer—more confident, more capable, more valuable.

I’m not promising AI won’t change things. I’m promising that if we learn the right skills now, we’ll be the ones steering the change, not drowning in it.

The time to upskill is now. Not tomorrow. Not next month. Now.

Join me on this journey:

  1. Star the Restate tutorial repo
  2. Set up your environment this weekend
  3. Build your first distributed app next week
  4. Share what you learned on Medium and Twitter
  5. Help the next person who shows up

Let’s build something that lasts. Let’s build a community that thrives. Let’s prove that in the age of AI, human determination and collective learning still matter.

Who’s with me?

P.S. If this resonated with you, follow me on Twitter @ibm2100 and join the discussion at github.com/PithomLabs/restate-tutorial/discussions. What will you build to thrive in this AI era?