L1
Honest Take — Before You Begin
Companion to COMPUTERSYSTEMSMASTERYCURRICULUM.md Written April 30, 2026 — honest reflections, no sugar coating.
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Course · 6 lessons
~45 hr
Advanced
Theory of Computation — Languages & Machines
Theory of Computation — Languages & Machines covers: SICP, Essentials of Programming Languages, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Understand the mathematical foundations of computing: what problems computers can solve, what they cannot solve, and how formal languages connect to real-world programming. From finite automata through Turing machines to complexity theory.
reading · we frame, you read MIT or the canonical
taught · we author, no canonical fits
↺ spirals back to earlier lessons
Course locked
Complete Systems Programming — UNIX, Kernel & Low-Level first.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
L2
SICP: The Book That Rebuilds What You Think a Program Is
You have called eval in Ruby. You have probably also been told never to call it. Here is the question this book answers: could you write eval? Not use it — implement it. An interp…
primary
MIT 18.404J Theory of Computation (OCW)
locked
L3
Essentials of Programming Languages: Every Language Answers the Same Questions
In 2019, Cloudflare took a chunk of the internet offline for 27 minutes. The cause was not a fleet failure or a bad deploy pipeline — it was one regular expression that backtracke…
primary
MIT 18.404J Theory of Computation (OCW)
locked
L4
Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Read That Takes Months and Changes You
Here is a tool your CI pipeline is missing: a method halts?(program, input) that returns whether a program will finish or loop forever. Ship it and you kill every hung worker, eve…
primary
MIT 18.404J Theory of Computation (OCW)
locked
L5
Module Checklist
Work through each item before the checkpoint.
locked
L6
Project: Automata Lab — NFA, Parser, and Metacircular Evaluator
The three theory deliverables as one Ruby project: a regex analyzer that builds real NFAs via Thompson's construction, a recursive-descent parser for an expression grammar, and a …
locked
6 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.