12mo roadmap · 13 milestones
The Software Engineering Landscape (2026)
Companion to docs/learning/swe-landscape.md. One milestone per domain, each a link hub to canonical sources. Pick 2-3 milestones to go deep on; treat the rest as vocabulary.
Outcome: Get a working mental model of every major systems-software domain — LLMs, DBs, streaming, game engines, containers, browsers, compilers, OS, networking, distributed, build, crypto.
How to work this roadmap
Treat each milestone as a claim that must be supported by evidence. Before reading, write what you think the mechanism does and where it will fail. After studying the linked concepts, run the drills without copying an answer, preserve the output, and revise the explanation. Move forward when you can connect the milestone goal to a working implementation, benchmark, architecture decision, or reviewable design artifact.
The 12mo horizon is a sequencing aid, not a completion badge. Spend more time where your prediction and the observed behavior disagree. Keep a short decision log containing the mechanism selected, alternatives rejected, expected failure mode, measurement used, and remaining uncertainty. Review that log with FSRS prompts so the roadmap produces durable system judgment rather than a temporary tour of terminology.
At the end, explain Get a working mental model of every major systems-software domain — LLMs, DBs, streaming, game engines, containers, browsers, compilers, OS, networking, distributed, build, crypto. from first principles to a reader outside the domain. A strong explanation should survive follow-up questions about correctness, cost, latency, resource use, security, recovery, and operational visibility. If it cannot, return to the milestone that contains the missing mechanism and build a smaller falsifiable example.
Milestones
Milestone 1
Prerequisites — unlock the rest of this path
Concepts the later milestones depend on. Without these the planner cannot serve the rest of this roadmap.
Concepts
- Caching
- CDN & Edge Delivery
- Pagination
- Queueing Theory
- Transaction Processing
- Isolation Levels & MVCC
- Retries & Circuit Breakers
- Web Security Basics
- Capacity Estimation
- Requirements Scoping
- LoRA & PEFT
- API Design
- Consistent Hashing
- Descriptive Statistics
- Embeddings
- Idempotency
- Multi-Head Attention
- Tokenization (LLM)
- Training & Debugging
- Object Modeling
- Probability Fundamentals
- Structured Outputs
- Checkpointing
- ML Math Foundations
- Softmax & Cross-Entropy
- Gradient Descent
- Language Modeling
- Backpropagation
- Embeddings (Transformer)
- AdamW Optimizer
Milestone 2
LLMs and inference engines
Transformers end-to-end, KV cache, paged attention, quantization.
Concepts
Milestone 3
Databases and storage engines
B-trees, LSM, WAL, MVCC, columnar — see the dedicated DB roadmap.
Concepts
Milestone 4
Streaming and event systems
Append-only logs, partitions, watermarks, stateful stream processing.
Concepts
Milestone 5
Game engines and real-time graphics
Fixed-step loops, ECS, render pipelines, GPU command buffers.
Concepts
Milestone 6
Containers and orchestration
Linux namespaces, cgroups, OCI runtimes, Kubernetes scheduling.
Concepts
Milestone 7
Browsers (Chromium, Firefox, Servo)
Parser, layout, JS engine, compositor, sandboxing, WebAssembly.
Concepts
Milestone 8
Compilers and language runtimes
Lexer → parser → AST → IR → optimization → codegen; GC, JIT.
Concepts
Milestone 9
Operating systems and kernels
Processes, virtual memory, schedulers, file systems, syscalls.
Concepts
Milestone 10
Networking and protocols
TCP/IP, TLS, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, QUIC, BGP.
Concepts
Milestone 11
Distributed systems
Consensus, replication, 2PC, gossip, vector clocks.
Concepts
Milestone 12
Build systems and developer tooling
Incremental builds, content-addressed caches, LSP, tree-sitter.
Concepts
None assigned yet.
Milestone 13
Cryptography (applied)
Primitives, signatures, AEAD, TLS, MLS, ZKPs.