Not another hello-world API. The tooling, the data layer, and the habits that survive a deploy.
White cards are real courses from the catalogue. Everything else on the rail is what we add.
Version control and types — boring on day one, load-bearing forever.
Branches, merges and the recovery moves. You'll use this hourly.
Types as a design tool, not a chore. The compiler becomes your first reviewer.
The vocabulary behind every performance conversation. Skippable if you have it.
A second language and the database — most backend work is one of these two.
Python from fundamentals to idioms — the lingua franca of scripts and services.
Schemas, joins, indexes and the queries you'll actually write at work.
Given a messy domain, you can design the tables, write the joins, and say why the index helps.
The gap between 'works on my machine' and 'deployed and boring'.
Auth, validation, logging, errors — the parts tutorials skip and outages find.
Containers from first principles, ending with a service anyone can run anywhere.
A public credential page anyone can check — the path, the score, the courses behind it.
Start where the placement puts you, and stop when the certificate says you’re done.