Paths

# Curated learning trails through the bundle: the master curriculum and its constituent paths, each pairing reading with exercises and proofs.

❯ cat documents/

The path to excellence Path 2026-08-08
The master curriculum — nine paths sequenced into five stages, from the machine underneath to leading the people on top, aimed at full-stack engineer, architect, and lead.
Foundations — the machine and the toolkit Path 2026-08-08
The layer under everything — text, time, algorithms, the OS, the network, and version control — learned by building the tools instead of trusting them.
Language craft — mastery in depth Path 2026-08-08
Four languages held to the same bar — Java and TypeScript as the working pair, Go and Rust as the perspective pair — each proven by a flagship build, with concurrency as the through-line.
Software craft — design in the small Path 2026-08-08
The discipline that keeps code changeable — tests as design pressure, refactoring as a safe operation, and architecture patterns earned through katas rather than believed on authority.
The full-stack web Path 2026-08-08
From browser internals to a shipped product — the frontend discipline in full, the API seam, and the RealWorld capstone where every piece must hold hands.
Systems at scale — distributed systems & data Path 2026-08-08
The vocabulary and the scar tissue of large systems — storage engines, caches, brokers, consensus, and the patterns that survive contact with failure, each built once by hand.
Platform & production Path 2026-08-08
What it takes to run software for real — cloud primitives, containers built from syscalls up, Kubernetes assembled by hand, infrastructure as reviewed text, and operations as engineering.
Security — the defensive craft Path 2026-08-08
Security as a first-class engineering skill — the attacks known by name, auth done right, TLS and crypto demystified by building and breaking them, and threat modeling as a habit.
AI engineering — the new tooling Path 2026-08-08
LLMs as an engineering material — a sound working model of what they are, then agents and RAG built from first principles until the magic is demonstrably a while-loop.
Architect & lead — the force-multiplier track Path 2026-08-08
The last mile from strong engineer to architect and lead — decisions written to scale, orgs designed like systems, debt managed like a portfolio, and leadership practiced as a craft.