Zero to engineer.
Tasks, not vibes. Eight of them, in order, with budgets set by someone who did this part-time, evenings and weekends, and remembers exactly where it gets lonely. You finish a task when you meet its exit bar, not when the calendar says so. End to end it comes to about eleven months alongside a job. Longer if life happens, and it will, which is why the slack is built in.
How the apprenticeship works
Most study guides are reading lists wearing a schedule. This one is a queue of tasks. Each task tells you what to do, where on this site to do it, what to deliberately skip, and what "done" looks like, so you exit on evidence instead of vibes. The budgets are honest part-time numbers, roughly ten focused hours a week, and the order matters: task 3 exists so task 4 makes sense, and task 1 is the operating manual for all the rest.
Read task 1 first even if you are starting mid-journey. It is the practice method, and it is the part almost everyone gets wrong before they get anything else right.
The eight tasks
- 01 read first · reread monthly
The rules of practice
The method everything else assumes: time boxes, a revisit schedule, talking aloud from problem one, and a definition of done.
Open → - 02 ~3 weeks
Weapon of choice
Pick one language, climb out of tutorial hell, and hit the fluency bar the rest of the plan quietly assumes you have.
Open → - 03 ~4 weeks
What the machine is doing
The load-bearing slice of computer architecture: memory, the call stack, and what actually happens when you run a program.
Open → - 04 ~5 weeks
Data structures, three passes
The standard list, three times over: read the idea, push on it in a simulator, then build it from a blank file.
Open → - 05 ~10 weeks
The long middle
Patterns and problem volume in an order that compounds, instead of a thousand-problem grind that does not.
Open → - 06 ~8 weeks · overlaps task 5
Build real things
Projects that run alongside the grind, because a repo you can talk about beats a streak you cannot.
Open → - 07 ~8 weeks
The systems layer
Operating systems, networks, databases, and enough distributed systems to hold a design conversation.
Open → - 08 ~6 weeks
Interview season
Mocks, behavioural stories, system design reps, and the warmup routine for the day itself.
Open →
The compressed schedule
weeks 1–3 language · 4–7 machine · 8–12 data structures · 13–22 problem solving · 17–24 build (overlapping) · 25–32 systems · 33–34 catch-up · 35–40 interviews
Eleven months of calendar for nine months of plan. The gap is not padding, it is the weeks you will lose to work, family, and the occasional flat fortnight, already priced in.