I will update this blog post when I think of new stuff to add to my todo list
Public artifacts?
A hustle should come out with some artifacts as proof I went through the fire. Thus I will post some of these on my github at https://github.com/xjpa/, while some of these I’ll just write about on this site
Main Targets
Build a toy OS (Operating System)
Working on this. See portfolio section on OSDev. Here’s a demo vid from one of my OSdev projects back in April, also shown below:
Data Quest maxxing
Speedruning the lessons and exercises + projects Data Scientist in Python Certificate Program from DataQuest.io which goes through python basics to data scientist skills like stats, ML, regression, trees, pands, PyTorch, business metrics.
Amazon Web Services certificates
Currently targeting 2 certifications
The first certification to signal that I have verified basic understanding of the current biggest trend of today, being (Generative) Artificial Intelligence. The second cert is to signal I understand costs and cloud architecture that may be needed to implement anything from AI solutions to web applications.
Then build actual systems to implement the learning.
These together provide a good baseline competence to build from to tackle more complex systems and imo is great at opening doors in a world where everyone is just LARPing about being an expert. The certificate so you can get searched, then a deployed system to get believed.
Microsoft certificates
Free certificates?
Hanging out at reddit.com/r/azurecertification, I learned that microsoft has events where I could get either a 50% or a full 100% free voucher for any certificate exam, which usually cost around $150 each exam
So I thought why not hustle for some microsoft certs? I’m feeling fresh and optimistic about this year, so why not grind when I get vouchers for 100% free cert exams?
I am targeting either cloud, security, or ai-related certs for career visibility
System Design Projects
The goal is to learn software system design going from Business -> Product -> Sofware Architecture viewpoints, and be competent enough to implement prototypes down to the low level (coding) implementation.
Get good at infra and devops
I came across this post about a hands-on/real world exercise based course on learning devops from basic linux to kubernetes and it made me think this is possible to learn on the side. I’m thinking of buying a year’s worth of subscription
Implement an AI paper
The best case is implementing an AI paper recently published in NeurIPS/NIPS or whatever big confference
Concrete List
If I were to distill the ideas from Main Targets, heres a list of ideas that I’d love to work on
- Solve at least 100 algorithmic problems
- Code an Operating System
- Learn cloud skills enough to be confident
- Code a SaaS
- Code a Distributed System
- Code ReactJS core rendering algorithms from scratch, like reconciliation
- Code a browser from scratch
- Code a consensus algorithm
- Code a compiler
- Learn Database Normalization really well
- Code a (Stocks) Trading Engine
- Code a Search Engine from scratch
- Code a Redis clone
- Code a database
- Code a distributed crawler
- Code a RAG system for millions of docs
- Code a Web Framework
- Code a Database
- Code a clone of Claude Code
- Code a clone of Docker
- Code a clone of Kubernetes
- Code a clone of Git/Version Control System
- Learn Docker Image Optimization
- Code an LLM
- Code a diffusion LLM
- Code a deep learning framework
- Learn Observability, heres some good resources: 1, 2
- Grind through the exercises at Iximiuz Labs, especially Docker and K8s
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03)
- AWS Certified AI Practitioner (AIF-C01)
- Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer Associate
The above in my opinion, speedruns my implementation and system design skills, which still remain foundational in a world where agentic coding is likely to take over
addendum
winners play, lets execute
