Software Engineer

The mandatory throughline of this roadmap.

• Software Engineer(85 concepts)

  • What Software Engineering Actually Is
  • Decomposition — Breaking Problems Apart
  • Abstraction — The Engineer's Superpower
  • Algorithms vs Code — Why Pseudocode Comes First
  • Reasoning About Efficiency — Big-O Intuition
  • Variables, Types, and Expressions
  • Control Flow — How Programs Make Decisions
  • Functions — The Unit of Reuse
  • Collections — Lists, Dictionaries, and Sets
  • Errors and Exceptions
  • Why Data Structures Matter
  • Arrays vs Linked Lists — The Memory Tradeoff
  • Stacks and Queues — LIFO vs FIFO
  • Hash Tables — O(1) Lookups
  • Trees and Binary Search Trees
  • Graphs — Modeling Relationships
  • Big-O — Speaking the Language of Performance
  • Sorting — Why It Looks the Way It Does
  • Binary Search and the Power of Sorted Data
  • BFS, DFS, and Graph Traversal
  • Recursion and Divide-and-Conquer
  • Dynamic Programming — When Greedy Fails
  • Bits, Bytes, and How Memory Is Laid Out
  • The CPU and the Fetch-Decode-Execute Cycle
  • The Memory Hierarchy — Registers, Cache, RAM, Disk
  • Operating Systems — What the Kernel Does
  • Processes, Threads, and Context Switching
  • Concurrency — Race Conditions and Locks
  • The Internet Protocol Stack
  • TCP, UDP, and Ports
  • HTTP — How the Web Talks to Itself
  • DNS, TLS, and What Happens When You Type a URL
  • Picking Your First Language Ecosystem
  • Object-Oriented Programming
  • Functional Patterns and First-Class Functions
  • Async Programming — Why and When
  • Git — Tracking Changes Without Losing Your Mind
  • Branches, Merges, and Pull Requests
  • Working on a Team — Workflows and Conflicts
  • The Frontend / Backend Split
  • HTML, CSS, and What the Browser Renders
  • JavaScript and the DOM
  • Components — The React Mental Model
  • State Management — Local, Global, Server, URL
  • Building Your First HTTP API
  • The Router / Service / Repository Pattern
  • Authentication and Authorization
  • REST API Design Principles
  • Other API Shapes — GraphQL, gRPC, Webhooks
  • The Relational Model and SQL
  • Schema Design — Tables, Keys, Relationships
  • Joins, Aggregations, and Subqueries
  • Indexes — Why Some Queries Are Slow
  • ACID, Transactions, and Isolation
  • SQL vs NoSQL — Choosing a Database
  • Why Tests Exist (and Why They Fail)
  • The Testing Pyramid — Unit, Integration, E2E
  • Test-Driven Development as a Practice
  • Linting, Static Analysis, and Type Checking
  • CI/CD — From Commit to Production
  • Containers — Docker and What Changed
  • Cloud Infrastructure — AWS, GCP, Azure 101
  • Observability — Logs, Metrics, and Traces
  • Deploys, Rollbacks, and Feature Flags
  • The Security Mindset and Threat Modeling
  • OWASP Top 10 — The Bugs That Bite
  • Cryptography Essentials and Secrets Management
  • Thinking Architecturally — Tradeoffs Over Solutions
  • Scaling — Vertical, Horizontal, Caching, Sharding
  • Monolith vs Microservices
  • Distributed Systems — CAP, Consensus, Replication
  • Reliability — Fault Tolerance and Graceful Degradation
  • Designing a System End-to-End
  • The Scientific Method for Debugging
  • Reading Stack Traces and Production Logs
  • Profiling — Finding Where Time Actually Goes
  • Incidents, Postmortems, and Root Cause Analysis
  • Reading and Reviewing Code
  • Clean Code — Naming, Functions, and Structure
  • Technical Writing — RFCs, Docs, and Commit Messages
  • Working in an Agile Team
  • The Engineering Ladder — Junior, Senior, Staff, EM
  • The Job Search — Resume, Portfolio, Interviews
  • Growing as a Senior — Technical Leadership and Influence
  • Engineering Ethics — Building Software That Doesn't Hurt People