Curriculum
OUTLINE

The Blueprint to Success

Our expert-led curriculum will prepare you for the toughest challenges that you may face in your journey to becoming a skilled programmer.

Course Outline

Core Module
Module name Duration (months)
The FDE Launchpad — Role, SQL & the Legacy Data Problem 1.25
The Ingestion Pipeline — Production Python 1.25
The Platform's Backend — Orders, Payments & Real-Time Systems 1.75
The Client-Facing Layer — Frontend Engineering for FDEs 1
The New Ask — Production RAG for Customer Support 1
From Answering to Acting — Agents & Enterprise Integration 1.25
The Scale Question — System Design for Black Friday 1.25
Scaling the AI Layer — Enterprise AI Architecture 1
Prepping the Ground — Linux, Networking & Shell 1
Containerizing Meridian — Docker & Kubernetes 1.25
Going Live — AWS Production Deployment with Terraform 2.25
Making It Bulletproof — Reliability, HA & Disaster Recovery 1
Enterprise Sign-Off — Security Hardening & Incident Response 0.75
Capstone & Hiring Readiness — New Client, Full Simulation 0.75
Elective Module
Module name Duration (months)
Going Live — AWS Production Deployment with Terraform 2.25
Making It Bulletproof — Reliability, HA & Disaster Recovery 1
Enterprise Sign-Off — Security Hardening & Incident Response 0.75
Capstone & Hiring Readiness — New Client, Full Simulation 0.75

Curriculum
Deep dive

Core Module

The FDE Launchpad — Role, SQL & the Legacy Data Problem

  • Your Playbook for Every Client Room
  • The Artifact Toolkit That Runs Every Engagement
  • Meet the Schema - From Entities to Queries
  • Reporting Views That Run the Dashboard
  • Find the Bottleneck, Fix the Query
  • No Half-Measures - Atomic Updates That Don't Corrupt
  • Designing a Schema the Client Won't Outgrow
  • Building Meridian's Full Data Model
  • Lock It Down - PII, Encryption & Audit Trails
  • Reaching Across the Firewall - Legacy Data Access
  • Picking the Right Engine for the Job
  • Quick Diagnostics Before the Pipeline Exists
  • Designing the Pipeline - ETL Thinking
  • Explaining Your Schema to the VP Who Signs Off
  • Turning Query Results into Client-Ready Insight

The Ingestion Pipeline — Production Python

  • Your Workbench - Python Toolchain Done Right
  • Stream It, Don't Load It
  • Reusable Building Blocks - Decorators & Context Managers
  • Modeling the Real World in Code
  • Make It Fast - Concurrency & Async
  • When the Data Fights Back - Error Handling & Resilience
  • Validate Everything, Log Everything
  • Prove It Works - Testing & CI
  • Code That Survives the Next Engineer
  • PySpark - When Python Meets Big Data
  • Pipeline Day - Full PySpark Ingestion Build
  • Under Pressure - Timed Python Build
  • PR Reviews That Build Trust, Not Walls
  • Write the Doc They'll Actually Read

The Platform's Backend — Orders, Payments & Real-Time Systems

  • Your First Production API
  • Routing the First Request
  • Making FastAPI Do the Heavy Lifting
  • Consuming APIs Like a Professional
  • Who Gets In - Auth Done Right with OAuth2 & JWT
  • Locking Doors by Role - RBAC, OIDC & Multi-Tenant Auth
  • The Order Lifecycle - State Machines in Production
  • Money and Messages - Payments & Notifications
  • The Contract Between Backend & Frontend
  • Break the Contract, Break the Build
  • Push, Don't Poll - WebSockets & Server-Sent Events
  • Queues, Cache, Invalidate - Redis & Message Patterns
  • See Everything - Observability & Tracing
  • Beyond Rows - JSONB, Full-Text Search & Vector Storage
  • Under the Hood - Why Your Query Is Slow
  • The Warehouse Layer - dbt, DuckDB & Dimensional Modeling
  • Orchestrating the Nightly Pipeline
  • When Events Beat Requests - Kafka Fundamentals
  • Pipeline Under Fire - Timed Debug Challenge
  • Running the Room - API Reviews & Incident Updates

The Client-Facing Layer — Frontend Engineering for FDEs

  • How the Web Works: From DOM to Dashboard
  • Async, Typed and Connected: Talking to the Backend
  • Thinking in Components: Building the Dashboard One Boundary at a Time
  • Forms That Don’t Frustrate: Validation, Control and Reuse
  • Wiring the Dashboard Live: APIs, Caching and Server State
  • KPIs, Tables and Filters: The Dashboard Takes Shape
  • Defending the Architecture: React Decisions and Next.js Awareness
  • Gating the Dashboard: Authentication, Roles and Protected Routes
  • When the Dashboard Comes Alive: Real-Time and AI-Ready Interfaces
  • Fast, Reliable and Ready: Testing and Performance
  • From Working Code to Leadership Confidence: Defending the Solution
  • The Handover Moment: Walking the Ops Team Through Their Dashboard

The New Ask — Production RAG for Customer Support

  • The AI Landscape - Picking Your Weapons
  • Your First System Prompt - And Why It'll Break
  • Choosing How to Serve - APIs, Context & Parameters
  • Prompts as Code - Versioning & Regression Testing
  • Building the Knowledge Pipeline - RAG End to End
  • Does It Actually Find the Right Answer?
  • Does It Tell the Truth? - Generation Eval & RAGAS
  • Guardrails That Actually Work - PII Leak Prevention
  • Red Team Your Own Copilot
  • Spend Less, Answer Faster
  • Ship It - Timed RAG Build
  • Explaining AI Risk Without Scaring the Room
  • Making Eval Numbers Mean Something to the Board

From Answering to Acting — Agents & Enterprise Integration

  • From Chatbot to Coworker
  • Giving the Agent Real Tools
  • Orchestrating Agent Intelligence with LangGraph
  • Production Agent Patterns
  • When the Agent Breaks
  • MCP - The Universal Tool Protocol
  • The Agent Team - Multi-Agent & Human-in-the-Loop
  • Mapping the Client's System Landscape
  • Data Integration with Legacy Enterprise Systems
  • Wiring It Together - API Connectors & Webhooks
  • When the Integration Breaks
  • Ship Day - The Full Agentic Copilot Goes Live
  • Red-Team War Room
  • Explaining What the Agent Will and Won't Do Alone
  • Getting the Client's IT Team on Your Side

The Scale Question — System Design for Black Friday

  • The System Design Playbook
  • Spreading the Load
  • Cache Everything
  • Consistency vs Availability
  • When One Database Isn't Enough
  • Shard It and Build It
  • When Your Table Hits 10TB
  • The Event Backbone - Kafka at Scale
  • Search That Scales
  • Rate Limiting & Unique IDs
  • Monolith or Microservices
  • Distributed Transactions - Saga vs 2PC
  • Whiteboarding With the Client's Architects
  • System Design Under Pressure

Scaling the AI Layer — Enterprise AI Architecture

  • Serving AI at Scale
  • One Gateway, Many Models
  • GPU Math - Capacity Planning
  • When to Fine-Tune - And When Not To
  • Embedding Pipelines at Scale
  • Vector Search at Billion Scale
  • Evals as Infrastructure
  • Tracking Experiments - MLflow & Model Registries
  • Ship Without Breaking - Canary Rollouts for AI
  • Is the AI Drifting?
  • Defend Your AI Architecture
  • Selling the AI Stack to the Board

Prepping the Ground — Linux, Networking & Shell

  • Your First Server
  • Who Gets Access
  • What's Running and Why
  • Finding the Needle
  • How Packets Flow
  • Locking Down the Network
  • TCP vs. UDP: Below the Surface
  • Automate the Boring Stuff
  • Scripts That Keep the Lights On
  • The log parser
  • Write the Runbook the 3AM Engineer Will Thank You For

Containerizing Meridian — Docker & Kubernetes

  • Containers 101
  • Slim, Fast and Secure Images in Production
  • Containers Talking to Each Other
  • Hardening Containers
  • Why You Need an Orchestrator
  • Deploy It
  • Wiring Services Together
  • Scale/Update Under Pressure
  • Lock It Down
  • Production K8s
  • The Pod Won't Start
  • Deploying AI Models on a Cluster
  • GitOps- Declarative Deployments with ArgoCD
  • Do We Really Need Kubernetes?
  • Coordinating the Rollout

Elective Module

Going Live — AWS Production Deployment with Terraform

  • Designing Your Cloud Network
  • Compute on AWS
  • Load Balancing Across AZs
  • Store It, Serve It, Cache It
  • Object Storage in the Cloud
  • Understanding the networking
  • SQL Database in the Cloud
  • NoSQL Database in the Cloud
  • Caching in cloud
  • Locking Down the Cloud
  • Breach Drill
  • Kubernetes in Cloud - I
  • Kubernetes in Cloud - II
  • Kubernetes in Cloud - III
  • Securing Meridian's cluster - I
  • Securing Meridian's data
  • Securing Meridian's application
  • Cert Manager & Route 53 (SSL + DNS Management) for Meridian
  • AWS Capstone Kickoff (Project Roadmap & Setup)
  • EKS Capstone: Part 1 (Cluster Design & Deployment)
  • EKS Capstone: Part 2 (Scaling & Production Readiness)
  • Cloud Rosetta Stone (AWS ↔ GCP ↔ Azure Service Mapping)
  • Boardroom Cloud Talk (Cost & Architecture Strategy)
  • War-Room 101 (Real-Time Incident Response & Communication)
  • IaC - Terraform Fundamentals
  • Terraform in Action
  • Creating a CI Pipeline
  • Deploying the Docker Image into an EKS

Making It Bulletproof — Reliability, HA & Disaster Recovery

  • SRE - When 99.9% Isn't Enough
  • Surviving Region Failure - HA Architecture
  • The DR Plan Nobody Tests (Until It's Too Late)
  • Sharding in Production - Not Just on a Whiteboard
  • Breaking to ensure it doesn't break
  • CRDs, Operators & Admission Webhooks in Kubernetes
  • Advanced AWS Networking
  • NoSQL & Caching on AWS
  • Load Testing at Scale - Proving It Before Black Friday
  • The Reliability Check
  • Selling Reliability to the CFO

Enterprise Sign-Off — Security Hardening & Incident Response

  • Threat Modeling - Where Will They Attack?
  • OWASP Top 10 - Hands-On Exploitation & Defence
  • Securing the AI Layer
  • Secrets, Keys & Certificates - The Lifecycle Nobody Gets Right
  • Compliance Frameworks - SOC2, GDPR & What FDEs Actually Do
  • Penetration Testing Your Own Platform
  • The Incident Response Playbook
  • Incident Simulation - Full Red Team Exercise
  • The Security Briefing the Board Actually Needs

Capstone & Hiring Readiness — New Client, Full Simulation

  • New Brief, Day One - The Capstone Kickoff
  • Build Sprint 1 - Data & Backend
  • Build Sprint 2 - Frontend & AI Feature
  • Red Team Day - Classmates Break Your Build
  • Portfolio Day - Packaging Meridian for Interviews
  • System Design Interview Prep
  • Behavioral & FDE Interview Prep
  • Capstone Demo Day - Graduation