Backend engineer trying to break into digital twins / industrial software *looking for direction*
I’m a backend engineer working mostly on distributed systems and product infrastructure, but recently I got obsessed with industrial software and digital twins. Especially around energy and nuclear systems.
The problem is that from the outside the field feels extremely fragmented. Depending on who you ask, “digital twin” can mean telemetry platforms, simulation, SCADA, industrial IoT, ML, physics models, or just enterprise dashboards with sensors attached.
To get closer to the space, I’m planning to build a small solar digital twin project using public datasets and some residential BIPV data, mostly to understand what these systems actually look like in practice.
For people already working in industrial software or nuclear:
If you were entering this field today from a backend/distributed systems background, what would you focus on first?
Am I misunderstanding what digital twin work actually is, or is the field genuinely this broad/confusing from the inside too?
A digital twin startup demo at a conference basically sent me down this rabbit hole and now I can’t stop thinking about it.