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Rahul's Study Planner
codeyashu/study-planner
Home
Today
Start here
Start here
The brief
How to use this site
Week 0 baseline
How others build roadmaps
Freshness contract
Roadmap
Roadmap
Phases & gates
Weekly rhythm
Weeks
Weeks
Week 00 — Baseline & environment
Week 01 — Agent patterns, structured outputs, SD framework
Week 02 — Tool calling, API design, two pointers
Week 03 — Context engineering, workflows, sliding window
Week 04 — Orchestrator-workers, AI-assisted dev, stack — interview-1
Week 05 — RAG fundamentals, caching, hexagonal
Week 06 — Hybrid search + reranking (light week)
Week 07 — Evals I — error analysis, LLM-as-judge
Week 08 — Evals II in CI + observability — interview-2
Week 09 — LangGraph orchestrator
Week 10 — MCP + Pydantic AI sub-agents
Week 11 — Durable execution, HITL, multi-agent
Week 12 — Protocols, memory, vendor SDKs (light) — interview-3
Week 13 — Guardrails & security
Week 14 — Cost, latency, routing
Week 15 — Managed platforms & production checklist
Week 16 — Architecture docs & AI-era leadership — interview-4
Week 17 — DSPy + Raft + free-threaded Python
Week 18 — Inference serving (light)
Week 19 — Fine-tuning trade-offs, GraphRAG
Week 20 — Consolidation — interview-5
Week 21 — Capstone polish + STAR bank I
Week 22 — Write-ups + STAR bank II
Week 23 — Full mock loops
Week 24 — Final loop — interview-6
Week 25 — Buffer I — catch-up + specialization choice
Week 26 — Buffer II — catch-up + next plan
Tracks
Tracks
Agentic AI
Agentic AI
LLM fundamentals: tokens, transformers, sampling, reasoning models
Prompting & structured outputs
Context engineering
Agent & workflow patterns (Building Effective Agents)
Tool calling & function design
RAG fundamentals: chunking, embeddings, retrieval
Hybrid search & reranking
Vector databases: pgvector, Qdrant & friends
Advanced RAG: agentic RAG, GraphRAG, LazyGraphRAG
Evals I: error analysis, LLM-as-judge, eval-driven development
Evals II: promptfoo, DeepEval, Ragas, Inspect in CI
LLM observability: Langfuse, Phoenix, OTel GenAI semconv
LangGraph: graphs, state, checkpoints
Durable execution & human-in-the-loop
Pydantic AI
DSPy & prompt optimization (GEPA)
Vendor agent SDKs: Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Google ADK, MS Agent Framework
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
A2A & AG-UI protocols
Agent memory systems (Mem0, Letta, Zep)
Multi-agent systems: when, how, and failure modes
Guardrails & security: OWASP LLM/Agentic Top 10, prompt injection
Cost & latency optimization: caching, batching, streaming
Model selection, routing & gateways (LiteLLM)
Inference serving: vLLM, SGLang, Ollama, quantization
Fine-tuning: LoRA/QLoRA, DPO, GRPO — and when not to
Managed platforms: Microsoft Foundry, Bedrock AgentCore
AI-assisted development: coding agents, AGENTS.md, skills
Shipping LLM features to production: the checklist
Capstone project
Capstone project
Capstone: Agentic Ops Copilot
P1: Structured extraction service
P2: Hybrid RAG with ablation study
P3: MCP agent and failure-mode analysis
P4: LLM gateway and guardrails
P5: Optimise and serve
P6: Distributed systems lab (Gossip Glomers)
Project rubric
Question bank
System Design
System Design
Interview framework & back-of-envelope estimation
Scalability fundamentals & latency numbers
Load balancing & proxies
Caching strategies
Databases: SQL vs NoSQL, storage engines
Replication
Partitioning & sharding, consistent hashing
Consistency models, CAP & PACELC
Consensus: Raft, leases, fencing
Message queues & streaming (Kafka)
API design: REST, gRPC, GraphQL, idempotency, pagination
Rate limiting & quotas
Search systems & inverted indexes
Blob storage, CDN & edge
Reliability: retries, backoff, circuit breakers, bulkheads
Observability, SLOs & error budgets
Batch & stream data pipelines
Multi-region, DR & failover
Security: authN/Z, OAuth2/OIDC, zero trust, multi-tenancy
Case studies
Case studies
URL shortener
News feed / timeline
Chat / messaging system
Notification system
Payment system
Distributed key-value store
Metrics & monitoring system
Ride hailing / proximity service
Distributed job scheduler
Question bank
AI System Design
AI System Design
AI system design interview framework
Design an enterprise RAG system
Design a ChatGPT-style assistant
Design a multi-agent platform
Design a multi-tenant LLM gateway
Design an LLM inference/serving platform
Design an LLM evaluation & observability platform
Design an intelligent document processing pipeline
Design AI-powered semantic search
Design a coding agent / code-review bot
Classic ML system design: recommendation & ranking
LLM capacity, latency & cost planning
Question bank
Architecture
Architecture
The architect role & trade-off thinking
Architecture styles: modular monolith → microservices → event-driven → serverless
DDD strategic: subdomains, bounded contexts, context maps
DDD tactical: aggregates, entities, value objects, domain events
Hexagonal / clean architecture, ports & adapters
CQRS & event sourcing
Sagas, outbox & distributed transactions
Enterprise integration patterns
Coupling, cohesion & modularity (balanced coupling)
Design patterns that still matter (GoF, modern)
SOLID, refactoring & code quality at scale
C4, arc42 & diagrams as code
Architecture Decision Records
Evolutionary architecture & fitness functions
Legacy modernization & strangler fig
Team Topologies & Conway's law
API contracts, versioning & schema evolution
Data architecture: lakehouse, data mesh, CDC
AI-native architecture: LLMs as system components
Question bank
Python
Python
Modern tooling: uv, ruff, ty, pre-commit
Python data model & dunder protocols
Advanced typing: generics, Protocols, ParamSpec, TypedDict
Pydantic v2 in depth
asyncio in depth: TaskGroups, cancellation, backpressure
Concurrency models: threads, processes, free-threaded 3.14t
FastAPI for production
Testing: pytest, fixtures, Hypothesis, testcontainers
Iterators, generators & context managers
Decorators, descriptors & metaclasses
Architecture patterns in Python (repository, UoW, message bus)
Packaging, project layout & monorepos
Performance & profiling
CPython internals: bytecode, GIL, memory
Data tooling: Polars, DuckDB, Arrow
Observability in Python: structlog, OpenTelemetry
Question bank
Java & Spring AI
Java & Spring AI
Modern Java 21→25: records, sealed types, patterns
Virtual threads, structured concurrency & scoped values
Spring Boot 4 & Spring Framework 7
Spring AI 2.0 fundamentals: ChatClient, advisors, structured output
RAG with Spring AI & pgvector
Tool calling & MCP servers in Spring AI
Agentic patterns with Spring AI
Observability & testing: Micrometer, OTel, Testcontainers
JVM performance, GC & Leyden/AOT
Java vs Python for AI: polyglot architecture decisions
Question bank
DSA
DSA
Problem-solving approach & complexity analysis
Python idioms for interviews
Arrays & hashing
Two pointers
Sliding window
Stack & monotonic stack
Binary search (incl. on answer)
Linked list
Trees: DFS, BFS, BST
Tries
Heap / priority queue
Backtracking
Graphs: BFS, DFS, topological sort, union-find
Advanced graphs: Dijkstra, MST, Bellman-Ford
Dynamic programming 1-D
Dynamic programming 2-D
Greedy
Intervals
Math, geometry & bit manipulation
Concurrency & low-level design problems (LRU, rate limiter, parking lot)
NeetCode 250 problem tracker
Question bank
Staff+ Skills
Staff+ Skills
Staff archetypes & operating at Staff+
Writing engineering strategy & vision
Design docs & RFCs that get approved
Influence without authority & alignment
Managing technical debt & quality
Mentoring, sponsorship & growing engineers
Incident leadership & blameless postmortems
Communicating with executives & stakeholders
Decision-making under ambiguity
Running architecture reviews & guilds
Leading engineering in the AI era: adoption, productivity, risk
Behavioral & Staff interviews: STAR stories bank
Question bank
Interview prep
Interview prep
Unified interview rubric
Interview checkpoints
Mock prompt bank
AI mock interviewer
Company interview processes
Communication & English
Communication & English
Articles & determiners: a / the / zero
Prepositions & collocations
Tenses & aspect: perfect vs simple, narrative tenses
Conditionals, modals & hedging
Sentence structure & parallelism
Active vs passive voice, inversion & emphasis
Clauses, participles & cohesion (linking words)
Punctuation & style
Common errors of fluent non-native speakers
Business & tech-leadership vocabulary
Word nuance & register (formal vs informal)
Idioms for work: meetings, strategy, negotiation
Phrasal verbs at work
Collocations & precision with numbers and data
Pronunciation: word stress, rhythm & intonation
Pace, pauses, filler words & clarity
Structuring spoken answers: PREP, pyramid, STAR
Meetings, presentations & speaking on calls
Shadowing & self-review method
Concise writing & editing
Email writing that gets action
Prose for design docs, RFCs & strategy
Executive updates, summaries & escalations
Feedback, disagreement & conflict
Negotiation & saying no
Storytelling & persuasion
Executive presence & handling Q&A
Listening, asking questions & cross-cultural communication
Weekly drills
Weekly drills
Week 00 drills — Baseline diagnostics
Week 01 drills — Articles, precision verbs, BLUF
Week 02 drills — Prepositions, word nuance, status updates
Week 03 drills — Present perfect, leadership verbs, meeting notes
Week 04 drills — Hedging, softening and concision
Week 05 drills — Parallelism, analytical connectors, PREP
Week 06 drills — Punctuation, collocations, shadowing (light week)
Week 07 drills — Explaining and influencing
Week 08 drills — Fluent-speaker errors, presentations and the RFC intro
Week 09 drills — Passive voice, numbers and postmortems
Week 10 drills — Emphasis, strategy and data stories
Week 11 drills — Articles, register and escalation
Week 12 drills — Cohesion, review and executive summaries
Week 13 drills — Strong verbs, executive language and briefings
Week 14 drills — negotiation and calibrated certainty
Week 15 drills — data storytelling and precise comparisons
Week 16 drills — mixed error review, the pitch and the one-pager
Week 17 drills — participle clauses, nuance and mentoring
Week 18 drills — error-log review, shadowing and upward feedback (light week)
Week 19 drills — rhetoric, persuasion and sponsorship
Week 20 drills — mixed advanced structures, the technical talk and Q&A
Week 21 drills — Interview stories and self-advocacy
Week 22 drills — Thinking aloud: system design and ambiguity
Week 23 drills — Error-log final push and the full mock loop
Week 24 drills — Final assessment and comparison with baseline
Week 25 drills — Free choice: attack your weakest area
Week 26 drills — Consolidate and set your next goals
Question bank
AI tutor prompts
Reading
Reading
Must-read articles & essays
Books
Courses
Engineering blogs
Today's feed
Newsletters
Papers
Podcasts & YouTube
Digest
Digest
Archive
Archive
September 2026
Categories
Categories
Daily
Trends
Trends
Tech radar — September 2026
What changed in 2025–2026
Log
Log
Mock interview log
Communication baseline
Communication error log
Ignorance log
ADRs
ADRs
Retros
Retros
Weekly retro template
ADR template
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Weekly retros
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One file per week:
week-NN.md
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