FAQ

There are two many resources; what should I use?

The primary resource for this course is Building Cloud Computing Solutions at Scale Specialization, and it extensively covers the most important concepts. You can work through this course as you attend class.

The secondary resources are this "live JIT (Just in Time) book on Rust. In the real world, you will be overwhelmed with information, and the best approach to using this information is to develop a heuristic. A good heuristic to master software engineering is building projects daily and making many mistakes weekly. When you are stuck, refer to a resource. Doing is much better than reading.

What can I do to get the most out of this class?

Try to code almost every single day for at least one hour. Use GitHub Copilot + continuous integration tools (Format/Lint/Compile/Test/Run) to understand how to build and deploy working software. The more cycles of building code while using these tools, the better you will get at real-world software engineering. There is no substitute for daily practice; you must code every day or almost every day.

It would be best if you also coded using the toolchain of modern tools that build quality software since jobs in the real world do care about code quality. Suppose you are not using automated quality control tools like formatting and linting locally and in the build system automatically to deploy binaries or microservices. In that case, you won't learn how to engage as a professional software engineer fully.