🎓 Courses, Labs & Channels
Hands-on labs (highest value) ⭐
- MIT 6.5840 Distributed Systems: labs in Go (MapReduce, Raft, KV)
- Fly.io Gossip Glomers: distributed systems challenges (Maelstrom)
- CodeCrafters: build your own Redis/Kafka/HTTP server/Git/SQLite (free tiers vary)
- codingchallenges.fyi (John Crickett): build real tools
- pgexercises.com · PortSwigger Web Security Academy · Kubernetes the Hard Way
- DataTalksClub Data Engineering Zoomcamp · LangChain Academy (LangGraph)
Free university courses
- CMU 15-445 Database Systems (Andy Pavlo) · MIT 6.5840 lectures · Martin Kleppmann’s Distributed Systems (Cambridge)
- Karpathy: Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
- Spring Academy (free) · Confluent Developer (Kafka, free) · Redis University (free) · KodeKloud (K8s) · Hello Interview (system design) · ByteByteGo · NeetCode · DeepLearning.AI short courses · AWS Skill Builder
YouTube
- System design: Hello Interview, Jordan Has No Life, ByteByteGo, Gaurav Sen
- Java/Spring: Dan Vega, Josh Long (Spring Tips), José Paumard (JEP Café), Java (official channel)
- Go: GopherCon talks, Ardan Labs, Anthony GG
- DSA: NeetCode, take U forward (Striver), Abdul Bari (theory)
- Infra: TechWorld with Nana, That DevOps Guy, CNCF talks
- AI: Andrej Karpathy, 3Blue1Brown, Anthropic, LangChain, AI Engineer (conference talks)
Newsletters & podcasts
- The Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz) · ByteByteGo newsletter · Latent Space (AI engineering) · Software Engineering Daily · InfoQ