Systems Engineer

Learn C: the language behind operating systems, embedded firmware, and the foundation of nearly every modern language. Manual control, explicit memory, no surprises. Every lesson is hands-on with real gcc execution.

Learn Rust: a systems language with the safety of a high-level one. Ownership, borrowing, pattern matching, zero-cost abstractions. Every lesson is hands-on with real cargo execution.

Level up from Rust Fundamentals. Ownership in depth, traits and trait objects, generics, lifetimes, iterator chains, Result/Option chaining, closures. The features that make Rust feel like Rust.

Beyond Rust Intermediate. Smart pointers (Box, Rc, RefCell), interior mutability, trait objects, declarative macros, unsafe basics. The features that close the gap between Rust and C++.

Learn x86_64 assembly: the instructions your CPU actually runs. Once you've written a hello world by directly invoking the Linux write syscall, you understand programs and the OS in a way no high-level language can teach.

Build malloc/free from scratch: bump allocator, free lists, splitting and coalescing, size classes, thread-local caches. By the end you'll understand what every allocator (jemalloc, tcmalloc, ptmalloc) actually does.

Build a real Unix shell from the ground up: tokenize quoted command lines, parse pipelines and redirections, expand variables and glob patterns, fork/exec child processes, and dispatch built-ins like cd, export, and history. By the end you'll deeply understand how bash, zsh, dash, and every other shell actually drive the Unix process model.

Build a RISC-V RV32I simulator: register file, instruction decoding (R/I/S/B/U/J formats), ALU + load/store + branch + jump execution, calling convention, syscalls, and the fetch-decode-execute loop. Same architecture as Spike, QEMU's RISC-V mode.

Build an ELF executable loader: parse the ELF header, walk program headers, mmap PT_LOAD segments, set up the initial stack and auxv, hand off to dynamic linker (ld-linux.so), apply relocations, and resolve symbols via GOT/PLT.

Build an ext-style file system: superblock, allocation bitmaps, inodes (with extents), directory entries, path resolution, journaling for crash safety, and the design choices behind ext4/xfs/btrfs/ZFS.