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yaml & code publishes one software-engineering concept a week, explained from first principles. If you’re not sure where to begin, here’s a shortcut.

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If you’re early in your career (or new to backend/infrastructure), start with System Design — it gives you the vocabulary for almost every other track.

If you’re mid-career and want to go deeper: Distributed Systems covers the hard problems behind every large system, and Databases from First Principles fills in what most engineers quietly hand-wave.

If you’re on-call and want to be less scared: Observability is the one that changes how you think about systems at 2am.

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One email every week. A single concept, explained properly, in about five minutes. No feed to fall behind on.