The Curriculum
Seven tracks, from fetch() down to packets and pages, through to distributed systems and interview craft.
Two deep tracks — networking and databases — go all the way down to packets and pages. The other five stages build back up: the building blocks, the consistency trade-offs, the APIs, the distributed patterns, and the worked case studies an interview actually asks for.
Track NDeep track
Networking, under the hood
The full life of a request: from fetch() in your code down to packets, and back.
Track DDeep track
Databases, under the hood
How Postgres actually executes your query: pages, B-trees, WAL, MVCC.
Track FDeep track
Frontend, under the hood
What actually happens inside a UI event or a render: capture/bubble, the rendering pipeline, batching, shared state, and async correctness.
Track ADeep track
Animation, under the hood
What actually happens when something moves on screen: the frame loop, how the browser interpolates, the compositor thread, easing, the Web Animations API, and FLIP.
Track GDeep track
GSAP, under the hood
How the animation library actually works: what a tween is, the single ticker, how it animates anything, timelines as data, its eases and matrix transforms, and ScrollTrigger.
Track TDeep track
Three.js & WebGL, under the hood
How a triangle becomes pixels on the GPU: the rendering pipeline, WebGL as a state machine, geometry and buffers, the model/view/projection matrices, shaders, the scene graph, draw calls, and materials.
Track WDeep track
WebAssembly, under the hood
What that .wasm file really is: a stack-machine bytecode, its flat linear memory, the compile toolchain, the JS boundary, why it is fast, streaming compilation, and WASI beyond the browser.
Track UDeep track
WebGPU, under the hood
The modern GPU API for the web: why it replaces WebGL, the device and queue, explicit buffers, baked render pipelines, WGSL, bind groups, command encoders, and compute shaders.
Track CDeep track
Canvas 2D, under the hood
The immediate-mode drawing surface: why the canvas forgets every shape, the pixel backing store, the drawing state machine, paths, the transform matrix, compositing, text and images, and the performance model.
Track SDeep track
Web Audio, under the hood
Sound as a processing graph on a real-time thread: samples and buffers, source nodes, sample-accurate AudioParam scheduling, gain and mixing, filters and effects, the FFT, and custom DSP with AudioWorklet.
Track EDeep track
The event loop, under the hood
How one thread runs everything: the call stack, the task and microtask queues, where rendering fits, promises and async/await as scheduling, Web Workers, and keeping the loop responsive.
Track VDeep track
JavaScript engines, under the hood
How V8 turns your source into fast machine code: parsing, Ignition bytecode, the TurboFan JIT and deopt, hidden classes and inline caches, value representation, and generational garbage collection.
Track RDeep track
The rendering engine, under the hood
How a page goes from HTML text to pixels: the critical rendering path, DOM and CSSOM construction, selector matching and the cascade, computed style, the render tree, layout, and paint.
Track KDeep track
React internals, under the hood
How React actually works: the virtual DOM and reconciliation, JSX and elements, the diffing heuristics, the fiber tree, render vs commit phases, hooks as a linked list, scheduling, and re-renders.
Track YDeep track
Cryptography, under the hood
The primitives behind every secure system: hash functions, password hashing, symmetric and public-key encryption, MACs and digital signatures, key exchange and forward secrecy, and secure randomness.
Stage 1
Core building blocks
Load balancers, caches, CDNs, object storage, queues, rate limiting.
Stage 2
Data & consistency at scale
Replication, CAP/PACELC, consistency models, quorums, conflicts.
Stage 3
Communication & APIs
REST vs gRPC vs WebSockets, idempotency, pagination, versioning, backpressure.
Stage 4
Distributed patterns
Event-driven systems, outbox, sagas, consensus, the exactly-once myth.
Stage 5
Case studies & interview craft
Worked designs — chat, feed, dispatch, ledger — with the interview framework.