Bottom line

Weeks 1–17 make you genuinely strong in network/security-layer Go — TLS, raw TCP/UDP, WAF/DDoS/bot-detection engineering, and SRE-grade hardening — areas most Go curricula never touch. To be a complete SME across backend, infra tooling, and high-performance systems (not just edge security), the nine projects above are the shortest path: they reuse the capstone's own code and directly target the exact things it never had a reason to build.