Books, courses and ideas that shape the way I build software. Notes from an ongoing learning process.
I wanted to understand the models behind both my coding tools and the AI features I help build. Hands-On Large Language Models gave me a visual foundation for tokens, embeddings, retrieval, and multimodal systems. These are my notes on connecting those concepts to practical engineering decisions in a product.
Brad Traversy’s course follows a full-stack application from planning through deployment, using Claude Code throughout the build. I was interested in how the decisions connect: what the user sees, how the data is stored, how access and billing work, and how the application is released. These are the lessons I took into my own development process.
Claude Code had become part of my everyday work before I had a clear structure for using it. This course helped connect context, planning, tools, and verification into a more deliberate process. These are my notes on the parts that helped me carry a task through implementation and review.
The choices behind a database write or a background task often become visible in the interface. DDIA helps me reason about those choices and explain their trade-offs. These are my notes on the chapters I keep returning to while building features across APIs, data, and user-facing workflows.
Software delivery includes conversations about needs, scope, expectations, and trade-offs. Soft Skills gave me a useful way to think about that work alongside the technical side of my career. These are the parts I return to as my responsibilities grow across the product and the client relationship.
Working across TypeScript and Python makes it useful to question the habits I carry between languages. Fluent Python is the reference I use when I need to understand Python’s behavior more deeply, from data structures and protocols to concurrency. These are my notes on using it alongside project work and small practice exercises.
Alongside full-stack project work and AI-assisted development, I keep a small habit of solving language exercises myself. Exercism gives me focused problems in Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript, with tests and community solutions to learn from. It is a practical way to keep the fundamentals in use.
I have used Refactoring.Guru as a reference for years. The book gives me a more structured way to revisit the principles and patterns behind everyday design decisions. These are my notes on using that vocabulary across feature planning, implementation, and review, including work with coding assistants.
After the core Full-stack Open course, I completed the TypeScript and relational database parts. They helped me connect interface code, API contracts, and persistent data more deliberately. These notes focus on those two completed courses and the foundations I carried into project work.
I took this course to understand web vulnerabilities from the application developer’s side. The exercises connected browser behavior, requests, permissions, and server-side processing. That perspective remains useful when I build a feature across the stack and review the paths a normal walkthrough might miss.
Full-stack Open was an important part of my foundation in React, Node.js, APIs, databases, and testing. I later used those ideas to build an e-commerce application from storefront to administration. This review records that learning stage and the connection between the course exercises and a complete project.
The Odin Project Foundations was one of my early steps into web development. Its projects made me use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, and the terminal directly. This review reflects that stage of learning and the habits I still rely on when building and debugging complete applications.