I got tired of roadmaps that jump straight from basic JavaScript into React and treat that as "software engineering".
Whenever you run into actual production issues—memory leaks, slow queries, networking bottlenecks, or weird Docker crashes—framework tutorials don't help. You need to understand how the operating system and network actually work.
I spent the last few months putting together a text-only curriculum around that:
https://wyrcan-io.github.io/roadmap/
A few choices I made with it:
- No video tutorials. It only links to official documentation and canonical textbooks (OSTEP for operating systems, DDIA for distributed systems, ISLP for ML). Text is much faster to reference and forces you to actually write code instead of passively watching someone else type.
- Instead of building a dozen random "Hello World" apps, the idea is to build and evolve one system through 12 stages: deploying a service on bare Linux, containerizing it, writing Terraform, setting up CI/CD, adding telemetry, etc.
- There are 106 checkpoints you can check off as you work through it. Progress saves in your browser's localStorage, and there's a button to export your progress as markdown into Obsidian or Notion.
The repo is here if you want to fork it or look at the sources:
https://github.com/Wyrcan-io/roadmap
Would appreciate any feedback on the sequence or good text resources I might have missed.
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