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Learning tracks

Nine tracks. Every lesson ends in a working system.

Pick a track based on what you want to be able to build, not what sounds impressive. Each one states its own prerequisites, difficulty, and time commitment honestly.

AI Engineering

advanced

Build retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, agent orchestration systems, prompt evaluation harnesses, and production LLM services with proper observability and cost controls.

Skills learned

RAG architecture, vector search, prompt engineering, agent tool-use, evaluation and guardrails, cost-aware model routing.

Projects in this track

  • Document-grounded RAG assistant with citation tracking
  • Multi-tool agent orchestration service
  • Prompt evaluation and regression-testing harness
  • Streaming chat API with token-cost accounting
  • Vector search reranking pipeline
  • Production deployment with observability dashboards

Backend Engineering

intermediate

Design REST and async APIs, background job queues, and service boundaries the way production systems actually require — including the failure modes tutorials usually skip.

Skills learned

API design, authentication and authorization, background workers, rate limiting, containerized deployment, structured logging.

Projects in this track

  • Multi-tenant REST API with role-based access control
  • Async job queue for long-running tasks
  • Rate-limited public API with API-key issuance
  • Dockerized microservice with health checks
  • Webhook delivery system with retries and backoff
  • CI-tested FastAPI service deployed to a real host
  • Structured logging and error-tracking integration

Database Engineering

intermediate

Move past basic CRUD into schema design, indexing strategy, replication, and query optimization using datasets large enough that bad decisions actually hurt.

Skills learned

Normalization trade-offs, index design, query plan analysis, migrations, replication basics, ORM performance pitfalls.

Projects in this track

  • Schema design workshop with a real multi-entity domain
  • Index tuning exercise on a slow analytics query
  • Prisma/SQLite to PostgreSQL migration project
  • Read-replica simulation for a reporting workload
  • Data integrity constraints and transaction design lab

Frontend Engineering

beginner

Component architecture, state management, and accessible interface design using React, Next.js, and TypeScript — grounded in real product screens, not isolated widgets.

Skills learned

Component composition, client and server state, routing, accessibility fundamentals, responsive layout systems.

Projects in this track

  • Accessible dashboard UI with keyboard navigation
  • Multi-step form with client-side validation
  • Data table with sorting, filtering, and pagination
  • Design-system component library in TypeScript
  • Server-rendered marketing site with Next.js
  • Dark/light theme system with persisted preference

Cybersecurity

advanced

Understand how APIs get broken by attacking a deliberately vulnerable reference service, then apply the same lessons defensively to your own backend code.

Skills learned

Authentication and session attacks, IDOR and access-control flaws, input validation, secure defaults, threat modeling basics.

Projects in this track

  • Broken authentication lab against a reference API
  • IDOR and access-control exploitation exercise
  • JWT misconfiguration and token-forgery lab
  • Hardening pass: turning the vulnerable API into a secure one
  • Threat model write-up for a real project architecture

OSINT

intermediate

Open-source intelligence gathering, tooling integration, and structured reporting for legitimate security research and defensive investigation — taught with clear ethical boundaries.

Skills learned

Passive reconnaissance, API-driven enrichment, correlation and reporting, operational hygiene for researchers.

Projects in this track

  • Domain and infrastructure recon reporting tool
  • Shodan and VirusTotal enrichment pipeline
  • AbuseIPDB and AlienVault OTX correlation dashboard
  • Structured OSINT report generator

Automation

intermediate

Build CI/CD pipelines and workflow orchestration for real deployment targets, including WhatsApp and outreach automation patterns drawn from shipped SYJ products.

Skills learned

CI/CD pipeline design, scheduled jobs, event-driven workflows, third-party API orchestration, deployment automation.

Projects in this track

  • GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline for a Python service
  • Scheduled reporting automation with retries
  • WhatsApp follow-up automation sequence
  • Multi-step workflow orchestrator

SaaS Development

advanced

Multi-tenancy, subscription billing, and usage-based pricing architecture for a real production SaaS, built end-to-end from database schema to deployed frontend.

Skills learned

Multi-tenant data isolation, subscription and billing integration, plan-gated feature flags, usage metering, production release process.

Projects in this track

  • Multi-tenant schema and row-level isolation design
  • Subscription billing integration
  • Usage-based metering and plan limits
  • Ten-phase production validation and launch checklist

CRM Development

intermediate

Build a multi-tenant CRM with contact pipelines, calling workflows, and automated follow-up sequences — modeled directly on a real, actively maintained CRM product.

Skills learned

Pipeline and stage modeling, calling/telephony integration basics, follow-up automation, multi-tenant CRM architecture.

Projects in this track

  • Contact and pipeline data model
  • Calling CRM workflow with call-log tracking
  • Automated follow-up sequence engine
  • Multi-tenant CRM dashboard

Ready to see the industry projects these tracks feed into?

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