Under the hood of git
For when you've done branches and PRs and want to understand what git is actually doing.
Git Internals — Objects, Trees & the DAG
What git actually stores: blobs, trees, commits, and refs. How the directed acyclic graph makes branching cheap and merges predictable.
Git Rebase, Bisect & the Reflog
Rewriting history cleanly with rebase, tracking down bugs with bisect, and recovering anything with the reflog. The power-user tier.
CI/CD with GitHub Actions
Run tests on every push, deploy on merge, check code quality automatically — and never break main again.
Beyond the basics
From reading commands to writing them. Scripts, config, and the tools worth knowing.
Shell Scripting Fundamentals
Variables, conditionals, loops, pipes, and functions. Turn one-off commands into repeatable, shareable automation.
Dotfiles & Shell Config
How .zshrc, aliases, and PATH work. Make the terminal feel like yours instead of a blank slate on every new machine.
Power CLI Tools
jq, fzf, ripgrep, curl — the handful of tools every developer eventually learns to love and can't work without.
The formats underneath
Schemas, validation, secrets, and what happens when you push markdown to its limits.
YAML Internals, Parsers & Typed Config
The YAML 1.2 spec's four processing layers, parser divergence, advanced Zod schemas, and typed config alternatives at scale.
JSON Schema & Validation
The spec that defines what your data is allowed to look like — powers VS Code autocomplete, API contracts, and content schemas.
MDX — Markdown Meets Components
What happens when you embed JSX inside markdown. How Astro, Next.js, and Docusaurus each use MDX differently.
Environment Variables & Secrets
Why .env files exist, how dotenv works, what secrets managers do, and why you should never hardcode a key.
How the modern web is actually built
Islands, server components, build pipelines, TypeScript — the internals the frameworks abstract away.
Astro Content Collections Deep Dive
Typed front matter, Zod schemas, getCollection() — how to build a fully validated content pipeline with Astro's native system.
Astro Islands Architecture
Partial hydration explained: what client:load, client:visible, and client:idle actually do and when to reach for each one.
React Server Components Deep Dive
What RSCs change about data fetching, bundle size, and where your code runs — and the cases where you genuinely shouldn't use them.
Build Tools Explained
Vite, esbuild, webpack, Rollup: what they actually do, why Vite won the DX war, and what it means for your project setup.
TypeScript for JavaScript Developers
Types, inference, generics — why every major framework standardized on it and how to read unfamiliar TS without freezing.
Monorepos — Turborepo & Nx
When and why teams reach for monorepos, how workspace packages work, and what task graphs actually do under the hood.
What's happening under the hood
The mechanics behind the tools — not theory for its own sake, but the understanding that makes you better at using them.
Prompt Engineering — Structured & Systematic
Roles, constraints, chain-of-thought, few-shot examples — the repeatable system behind prompts that actually work consistently.
MCP — The Model Context Protocol Explained
How Claude and other AI tools connect to external systems, databases, and APIs. The protocol that makes AI agents actually useful.
RAG Explained — Retrieval-Augmented Generation
How AI tools ground their answers in real data: embeddings, vector search, and why this matters more than fine-tuning for most use cases.
The Transformer Architecture (Plain English)
What attention mechanisms and token prediction actually mean — without the math. The mental model behind every modern LLM.
Where your code actually lives
The layer between your code and the browser — edge networks, DNS, and how APIs actually work at deployment.
Edge Computing Deep Dive
What running code at the edge actually means: Workers, KV, Durable Objects, and the latency math behind why this matters.
DNS & Domains Demystified
A records, CNAMEs, nameservers, TTL, and the exact sequence of events between buying a domain and having it serve traffic.
Building Your First API
Routes, handlers, request/response lifecycle, and how to deploy a real API with Hono or Express on Cloudflare Workers or Vercel.