COURSES

Learn, in full.

Self-paced courses taught as a three-column reader: a section index, the main text, and a margin of diagrams that follows you down the page.

ALL COURSES

Cloud / Platform Engineering

Kubernetes from Zero: Containers, Clusters, and Operations

Build the substrate knowledge that production platforms depend on A beginner-first path from laptop processes and containers through Kubernetes workloads, networking, storage, security, and troubleshooting, using the public HelixWorks monorepo as one recurring system.

Published 21 Jun 2026 · 61 days

Cloud / Platform Engineering

HelixWorks: Build an AI Application Platform on AWS

From customer intent to isolated EKS production with GitOps and ambient mesh Build the public HelixWorks monorepo through one 35-day product journey: specifications, generation, previews, managed data, identity, releases, GitOps, Istio ambient service identity and policy, reversible operations, and an evidence-gated AWS production decision.

Published 11 Aug 2026 · 35 days

Cloud / Platform Engineering

Self-Service Cloud Infrastructure with Crossplane

Per-service cloud identity and a GitOps claim API, built on Crossplane v2 A clean-slate introduction to cloud resources, control planes, and self-service APIs. Start with familiar application interfaces, then progressively build a Crossplane v2 claim API, per-service identity, a clear Terraform boundary, GitOps safety, and a phased production rollout.

Published 29 Jul 2026 · 8 days

Cloud / Platform Engineering

Safe Schema Migrations and Progressive Rollouts

Choose, execute, and prove data changes without incompatible traffic A three-day, evidence-first course on compatibility migrations, blue/green cutovers, and recovery from the edge cases that make data releases dangerous.

Published 12 Aug 2026 · 3 days

Design

The Designing Eye

Information design, after Edward Tufte Things worth seeing and the principles behind why they work. A field guide to graphical excellence: data-ink, small multiples, sparklines, layering, and the quiet craft of showing information honestly.

Published 21 Jun 2026 · 7 days

AI / Machine Learning

Transformers, From the Ground Up

Nine days from tokens to a full forward pass The transformer architecture built one piece at a time: tokenization and embeddings, positional encoding, scaled dot-product attention, multi-head, residuals and layer norm, the feed-forward block, the full stack, training, and inference. Every step worked with tiny numeric matrices and interactive widgets.

Published 04 Jul 2026 · 9 days

AI / Machine Learning

How LLMs Actually Work

From next-token prediction to agents and evaluation What turns a next-token predictor into a useful assistant: pretraining and perplexity, scaling laws, sampling, fine-tuning and LoRA, RLHF and alignment, prompting and in-context learning, agents and tool use, and evaluation. Concepts made concrete with worked numbers and hands-on Lab widgets.

Published 04 Jul 2026 · 8 days

AI / Software Engineering

How Long-Term-Memory Email Agents Actually Work

From controlled LangGraph workflow to a secure production memory system Build an email agent one architectural layer at a time: deterministic triage, bounded tools, semantic facts, episodic examples, procedural instructions, background learning, production data infrastructure, and the delivery and governance controls needed to operate it safely.

Published 05 Aug 2026 · 8 days

AI / Software Engineering

Building HelixWorks: Production Microservices for AI Workflows

Build a governed supplier-onboarding product from intent to production evidence Build HelixWorks, a multi-tenant AI workflow product, across ten practical days. Turn requirements into immutable blueprints, run bounded agents, integrate supplier systems through governed connectors, publish domain events, promote immutable releases, and operate the system across local, dev, staging, and production environments.

Published 26 Jul 2026 · 10 days

AI / Security Engineering

Securing HelixWorks: Enterprise Agent Authorization

From identity boundaries to delegated agents and revocation evidence Build enterprise authentication and authorization from first principles across sixteen cumulative days. Separate sessions, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SCIM, Better Auth, application policy, workload identity, delegation, approvals, revocation, audit evidence, and release gates while hardening the same HelixWorks product.

Published 14 Aug 2026 · 16 days

Security / Software Engineering

Secure Connector Engineering: From OpenAPI to OAuth Operations

Turn untrusted API descriptions into bounded, observable network effects Build one secure connector gateway from contract ingestion through metadata discovery, PKCE, dynamic registration, secret-safe execution, race-safe renewal, and a reconciled state migration.

Published 14 Aug 2026 · 9 days

Software Engineering

SWE System Design

Core distributed-systems ideas for software engineers A visual course on the concepts behind reliable large-scale software systems: availability, consistency, partition tolerance, replication, sharding, caching, queues, consensus, failure modes, and the tradeoffs engineers must choose explicitly.

Published 09 Jul 2026 · 40 days

Software Engineering

Streaming Data Platforms

Kafka, the commit log, and the problems of streaming at scale How log-based streaming platforms like Kafka work — topics, partitions, offsets, replication, retention and compaction — and the real-world problems they create (rebalancing storms, hot partitions, consumer lag, duplicate and out-of-order delivery, exactly-once pitfalls, schema evolution) and how engineers fix them.

Published 09 Jul 2026 · 2 days

Software Engineering

Building an Observability Platform

From system behaviour to operational action Begin with the debugging loop every engineer already uses, then build an observability platform one block at a time. Learn telemetry before tool names; add metrics, logs, traces, profiles, collection, storage, investigation, action, scale, cost, security, and incident evidence progressively.

Published 04 Aug 2026 · 24 days

Software Engineering

Bun Service-Oriented Systems: From Modular Monolith to Production

Build one order-to-delivery system, extract services only when evidence earns the boundary Build ParcelFlow as a tenant-aware order-to-delivery system on Bun: begin with a modular monolith, make state and contracts durable, then extract, observe, deploy, and retire services only when measured coupling and failure evidence justify each boundary.

Published 09 Aug 2026 · 12 days

Engineering Leadership

Senior-to-Principal Growth OS

A practical system for scope, opportunity, feedback, sponsorship, and evidence A ten-day operating system for senior engineers and their managers: understand Staff+ scope, run focused growth conversations, design real opportunities, choose the right support, and build honest evidence of durable organizational impact.

Published 26 Jul 2026 · 10 days

AI / Learning Systems

Building an Adaptive Knowledge Graph

One graph, every lesson — how I made a kids' curriculum teach each child differently A build retrospective: modeling a whole Arabic-learning curriculum as one knowledge graph, layering a per-child learner model on top, and generating every surface — app, web, printables, books, marketing — from that single source. The real system behind Amal, live for 95,000+ families.

Published 16 Jul 2026 · 10 days

Case Studies

The Evolution of the Netflix API Architecture

A case study: from monolith to a one-size-fits-all REST API to experience-based APIs to federated GraphQL. How and WHY Netflix re-architected its API layer over a decade — the tradeoffs behind each unusual decision, told as a system-design case study.

Published 09 Jul 2026 · 5 days

Case Studies

SpatialX Orca: A Gigapixel Cancer-AI Platform

How a three-person team shipped an end-to-end AI pathology platform — UI as data, behavior as data, infra as code A build case study of Orca, an end-to-end platform for AI cancer annotation, training, and inference for pathologists. How a tiny team shipped a gigapixel whole-slide-image platform: the product problem, a generic JSON-driven frontend, an adaptive gigapixel canvas and its patent, a storage-first workflow engine where behavior is data, infrastructure as code, and compliance-by-architecture for PHI.

Published 16 Jul 2026 · 11 days

Software Engineering

Server-Driven UI: The UI Is Data

Render anything from JSON — two production case studies, from a gigapixel medical canvas to a kids’ learning app Server-Driven UI (SDUI) built one piece at a time: what it is and why, the section contract, actions as hyperlinks (HATEOAS-lite), forward compatibility and unknown-type handling, behavior as data, and building sections in isolation. Grounded in two real implementations — SpatialX Orca’s React/OpenLayers pathology canvas and Alphazed’s Flutter workflow/screen/section/content-bit renderer.

Published 16 Jul 2026 · 10 days

Decision Making

Eight days from values clarification to calibrated action A practical system for making consequential choices: clarify values with OOC-EMR, frame the decision, create real options, reason under uncertainty, counter bias, choose the right speed, improve group judgment, and learn from every result.

Published 24 Jul 2026 · 8 days

Communication

Public Speaking

Practical tools for making ideas clear, memorable, and persuasive A beginner-friendly course in public speaking: how to open with a useful promise, guide attention, choose the right visual tools, rehearse with honest audiences, make ideas memorable, and finish with strength.

Published 24 Jul 2026 · 4 days

Communication

How to Argue

Practical argument, persuasion, and negotiation for real disagreements An eight-day learning path through mapping disagreements, building and arranging arguments, adapting to audiences, refuting constructively, and negotiating toward workable outcomes.

Published 24 Jul 2026 · 8 days

Writing

Draft No. 4: The Writing Process

Eight practical lessons in finding, reporting, structuring, and revising nonfiction John McPhee’s writing process rebuilt as an eight-day practical course: find subjects through durable interests, gather and select material, discover structure, work with editors, report with precision, verify every claim, revise through four drafts, and strengthen prose through omission.

Published 24 Jul 2026 · 8 days

AI / Security Engineering

The Agent Intrusion: How Authority Accumulated Across Trust Boundaries

A three-day defensive reading of evidence, feedback loops, and authority amplification Read the July 2026 Hugging Face agent intrusion as an evidence problem, reconstruct how an automated loop crossed trust boundaries, and identify the earliest control that would stop a foothold from becoming reusable authority.

Published 11 Aug 2026 · 3 days

ON TEACHING

This page is about a lifetime of teaching and self-teaching across the years: courses I've taught to others and courses I've taught myself.

Around 1500+ onsite learners have sat through these courses over the years.

I love to teach. And I learn by teaching.

COURSES I'VE TAUGHT