Engineering field guides
From the kernel to LLMs: field guides you read like books.
Long-form, hands-on guides from the kernel to the browser. Read them as books, follow the series, run the labs.
- 19
- guides
- 1396
- chapters
- 80 h
- of reading
- 163
- runnable Go programs
Spotlight · AI
From classical ML through Transformers to training, serving, and optimizing LLMs, plus agents, harnesses, production deployment, and world models.
Jump straight in
The engineering path
One course in reading order. Each guide's “Next guide” button follows this path, whichever section shows it below.
Systems
The machine every request starts and ends on, containers and Kubernetes in production, how to measure it under load, and how to design whole systems that scale.
Operating Systems, Linux & Containers
Processes, memory, files, sockets, containers, Kubernetes — and Go on Linux, including a container runtime you build.
Docker & Kubernetes — The Real-Life Field Guide
One cloud system built end to end: production Dockerfiles, Kubernetes, autoscaling, OpenTelemetry, GitOps, canaries and DR, in a Linux lab VM.
Scale, Load & Performance Testing
Network and latency fundamentals, percentiles and jitter, open-source load-test tools, and simulations.
Real-Life System Design
For Senior, Staff, Principal & EM interviews
Estimation and building blocks to consensus, multi-region and cost; how real companies built it, 16 solved cases, 12 mock interviews, and the playbook for senior design loops.
Networking
How machines talk: the OSI map, TCP/IP in depth, and one HTTPS request end to end.
The OSI Model, One Click at a Time
One “Place order” click through all seven layers: real addresses, a millisecond timeline, and a debugging playbook by layer.
Networking from Zero (TCP/IP)
L1–L4 in depth with packet captures and professional network operations, plus 23 Go labs.
The HTTPS Request Lifecycle
One request end to end, then the server side built in Go; the finale traces one request through every guide.
TCP/IP — The Complete Field Guide (reference)
The denser companion to Networking from Zero: a lookup manual for the TCP/IP suite, from packets to performance forensics.
Security
From encoding vs encryption to cloud, Kubernetes and advanced web attacks.
Security from Zero
Encoding vs hashing vs encryption, TLS packet by packet, your own CA, SSH hardening, and the OWASP Top 10.
Security Engineering in Depth
Cloud and Kubernetes security, distributed authorization, advanced web attacks, data protection, detection — 10 Go labs.
Programming
The languages the labs are written in, and the algorithms behind them.
Go — The Complete Field Guide
Syntax to systems internals, concurrency, networking, security services, and production operations.
Go 120-Day Engineering Plan
Daily exercises that grow into an L4 load balancer, a TLS proxy, a WAF, DDoS defences, and an edge security proxy.
Rust — The Complete Field Guide
Ownership, borrowing, traits, async/Tokio and unsafe, then the series' OS, network, HTTPS and security labs rebuilt in Rust.
Python — The Complete Field Guide
Names and objects to CPython internals, asyncio and the GIL, the OS, network and security labs in Python, NumPy to PyTorch and LLM apps, and requests read end to end.
C — The Complete Field Guide
Memory, pointers, the standard library, real allocators, SQLite/Redis/curl walkthroughs, and a Linux driver.
JavaScript — The Complete Field Guide
The language from beginner to expert, how browser engines render a page, HTTP from the browser and Web Workers; then LLMs in the browser, agents and actionable UIs, OWASP security, open-source internals, Playwright E2E, and a live animated Browser Lab.
Data Structures & Algorithms
Plain-language explanations, real-world analogies, pseudocode, and Go implementations for every core topic.