Learning path / 26 published lessons
Cross-topic retrieval and revision practice
Return to earlier topics through mixed retrieval, worked problems and design comparisons. Use the gaps you discover to choose your next focused lesson rather than racing a fixed calendar.
What you’ll work toward
- Specify a reproducible exercise environment and separately diagnose CRLF line endings, filesystem placement and package isolation; no setup script guarantees all three are prevented.
- State what a commit, a branch, and a remote actually are — snapshot, movable pointer, named URL — and recover lost work with git reflog.
- Write a shell pipeline that answers a real question from a raw log file, and explain that each stage is a separate process reading stdin and writing stdout.
- Pick the right doc type for the question you have (tutorial, how-to, reference, explanation) and fall through the doc-hunting funnel when the first source fails.
Completion is stored on this device only. Nothing is locked; start where it makes sense.
Start this pathBefore the first lesson
- Study the named sessions before using this assessment
These are the starting lesson’s prerequisites, not requirements for every advanced topic below.
How to practise this subject
Attempt the task before reading its explanation. Record the assumption or step you missed, redo it without the page, then change one condition and predict the consequence.
- 01
R01 · Week 1 Recall & Drill
Week 1 revision: reproducible dev environments, Git's object model, shell pipelines, doc-hunting strategy, and Python's reference-based memory model.
- 02
R02 · Week 2 Recall & Drill
Week 2 revision: the iterator protocol behind for-loops, argument grammar and closures, data structure Big-O choices, class attribute lookup, and inheritance vs composition.
- 03
R03 · Week 3 Recall & Drill
Week 3 revision: exception discipline and pdb, import resolution and packaging, pytest fixtures and the TDD loop, type hints that no runtime enforces, and Big-O as a growth rate.
- 04
R04 · Week 4 Recall & Drill
Week 4 revision: discrete math as the language under SQL, vectors and cosine similarity, matrices as transformations, the chain rule, and gradient descent from scratch.
- 05
R05 · Week 5 Recall & Drill
Week 5 revision: distributions and Bayes' rule, what a p-value actually claims, two-pointer and sliding-window templates, hashmap internals, and linked-list surgeries.
- 06
R06 · Week 6 Recall & Drill
Week 6 revision: LIFO vs FIFO as a scheduling choice, recursion's three ingredients, tree traversal orders, heaps as partial order, and graph traversal with weights.
- 07
R07 · Week 7 Recall & Drill
Week 7 revision: sort trade-offs beyond Big-O, the two binary search templates, DP preconditions versus caching, greedy proofs and backtracking pruning, and normalisation to 3NF.
- 08
R08 · Week 8 Recall & Drill
Week 8 revision: SQL logical execution order, joins as filtered Cartesian products, aggregate NULL semantics, windows that preserve rows, and recursive CTEs.
- 09
R09 · Week 9 Recall & Drill
Week 9 revision: B-tree selectivity and composite index order, isolation levels and write skew, reading execution plans, the four NoSQL families, and star schema grain.
- 10
R10 · Week 10 Recall & Drill
Week 10 revision: bounded versus unbounded data, Spark stages and shuffles, Kafka as a log rather than a queue, watermarks and exactly-once effect, and idempotent orchestration.
- 11
R11 · Week 11 Recall & Drill
Week 11 revision: dbt as a compiler not an engine, lakehouse metadata layers over Parquet, the four data-quality pillars, lineage-driven governance and cost, and HTTP caching.
- 12
R12 · Week 12 Recall & Drill
Week 12 revision: resource modelling and idempotency keys, GraphQL's N+1 and cost limits, Protobuf field tags and RPC shapes, delegated authorisation versus identity, and Linux processes, memory, and file descriptors.
- 13
R13 · Week 13 Recall & Drill
Week 13 revision: TCP as a byte stream, L4 versus L7 load balancing, cache-aside and stampedes, CDN cache keys and Vary, and Docker layers as processes not VMs.
- 14
R14 · Week 14 Recall & Drill
Week 14 revision: declarative reconciliation over imperative starts, config and secrets injection, cloud identity and network isolation, Terraform state as authoritative mapping, and CAP versus PACELC.
- 15
R15 · Week 15 Recall & Drill
Week 15 revision: replication topologies and split-brain, consistency guarantees and their scope, Raft's real difficulty, hot partitions and consistent hashing, and at-least-once queues.
- 16
R16 · Week 16 Recall & Drill
Week 16 revision: RTO and RPO driving topology, which observability pillar answers which question, PromQL and cardinality, error budgets as budgets, and mitigate-before-diagnose.
- 17
R17 · Week 17 Recall & Drill
Week 17 revision: resource authorization, password KDFs, certificate trust and SAN checks, SQL injection boundaries, leakage-safe evaluation and least-squares gradients.
- 18
R18 · Week 18 Recall & Drill
Week 18 revision: likelihood and decision costs, ridge/lasso geometry, learning-curve assumptions, greedy tree impurity and measured ensemble diversity.
- 19
R19 · Week 19 Recall & Drill
Week 19 revision: negative-gradient boosting, tie-aware ranking metrics, leakage-free preprocessing, imbalance policies and honest evaluation of selected procedures.
- 20
R20 · Week 20 Recall & Drill
Week 20 revision: affine collapse and nonlinear XOR, batched MLP shapes, numerical backprop checks, optimizer recurrences and PyTorch mode/gradient contracts.
- 21
R21 · Week 21 Recall & Drill
Week 21 revision: dropout and normalization contracts, convolution shapes, recurrent Jacobian products, embedding objectives and controlled transfer-learning decisions.
- 22
R22 · Week 22 Recall & Drill
Week 22 revision: exact toy BPE, attention variance and tensor shapes, permutation equivariance, positional mechanisms and fixed-width versus KV-cache budgets.
- 23
R23 · Week 23 Recall & Drill
Week 23 revision: transformer block contracts, attention visibility, normalized decoding filters, conditional compute heuristics and exact streamed attention.
- 24
R24 · Week 24 Recall & Drill
Week 24 revision: prompting evaluation, chunk-span recovery, authorized hybrid ranking, exact-neighbor recall and bounded verified tool-workflow models.
- 25
R25 · Week 25 Recall & Drill
Worked revision of agent handoffs, judge bias, LoRA, KV-cache sizing, batching and multimodal extraction with bounded local code and source-backed answers.
- 26
R26 · Week 26 Recall & Drill
Worked system-design revision: explicit capacity assumptions, atomic identifier allocation, lost acknowledgements, feed work and enforced AI cost budgets.