90d roadmap · 3 milestones
12-Week Systems Foundations
Build a mechanism-first model from hardware and kernels through runtimes, networks, performance, and isolation. Three four-week milestones move from mechanisms to production trade-offs and a measured synthesis artifact.
Outcome: Build a mechanism-first model from hardware and kernels through runtimes, networks, performance, and isolation.
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 90d 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 Build a mechanism-first model from hardware and kernels through runtimes, networks, performance, and isolation. 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
Weeks 1-4 — Foundations and mechanisms
Build the domain vocabulary and explain the core mechanisms from first principles.
Concepts
Milestone 2
Weeks 5-8 — Production systems and trade-offs
Design the production path, including resource, scale, safety, and operability trade-offs.
Concepts
Milestone 3
Weeks 9-12 — Reliability, verification, and synthesis
Test failure modes, measure outcomes, and ship the synthesis artifact.
Concepts
Build evidence
- Synthesize: Systems Foundations — Build a tiny HTTP/1.1 static-file server on raw TCP sockets without a framework or high-level HTTP server library. Parse requests, serve bounded files, handle partial I/O, inject failures, measure the result, and explain how the operating system, network, memory, concurrency, and storage paths interact.