This is going to be a short post.
Over the last few months you've sent me a lot of ideas about where this publication should go. Office hours, the Substack chat, LinkedIn DMs, replies to the newsletter. I wrote them all down and ended up with nine.
Nothing below is decided, so I'd rather hear what you think of each one than guess and get it wrong.
So, before anything else: please fill in this form!
It takes three minutes of your time and it tells me more than anything else I could do. Nine ideas, you say what you think of each one, and there's an open box at the end for whatever else is on your mind.
That's the whole ask. The rest of this post is just the nine ideas explained, in case you want more context before you answer.
1. Live system design office hours. Code is getting cheaper every week. Deciding what to build isn't. Streaming or batch, RAG or fine-tuning, scale-to-zero or always-on. Those calls are learned by arguing about them out loud, not by reading a tutorial. More of that, fewer tutorials.
2. Move the sessions to Zoom. Substack Live is frictionless but it's comments only, and there's a ceiling on how well we get to know each other through a comment box. Zoom gives us faces, voices and a real back and forth, at the cost of a click.
3. A fundamentals track. Proper recorded courses, Coursera style, that get you up to speed on the fundamentals of AI engineering and ML engineering: containers, GPUs, MLOps, data and streaming, serving and scaling, evals. Our content isn't easy, and I keep pointing you at outside resources that don't line up with how we think about systems here.
4. 1:1 mentorship. Career direction, your project reviewed, or interview support. I get hundreds of requests a week and can't answer them one by one. A small program with a few mentors might be the only way to answer any of them properly.
5. A real community space. Something with Slack or Discord vibes, where you can ask a question the moment you're stuck instead of holding it for the next session. Office hours are weekly. Your questions aren't.
6. Guest teardowns. Bring in engineers to pull apart architecture paradigms and systems they actually run in production. Different voices, same obsession with real systems.
7. A monthly system design challenge. I post a system design problem, everyone submits a solution, we analyse them together on a live session, and the winner co-authors the write up with me. Your name on the article, next to mine.
8. A reference architecture library. Forkable templates for the patterns we keep teaching, so you start from a real skeleton instead of an empty repo.
9. More career and interview prep. System design rounds, take homes, portfolio reviews, negotiating the offer.
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
Miguel
1. Live system design office hours - Very Helpful and cant learn these things on our own easily without guidance... no one is talking about this.. everyone expects this is something people may already know. Which is Not true at least for myself..
2. Move the sessions to Zoom. - Much needed.
3. A fundamentals track. - can be given as supplementary materials created by whoever best captured that concept. I would love you to focus on writing cutting edge stuff that sits right between Elementary Knowledge (that a serious learner will definitely gather) and Expert Engineers (who may not favor this style of learning)... Foundational Concepts that push the Usefulness / practical Needle in the AI space.
4. 1:1 mentorship. Encouraged would love to take.
5. A real community space. Yes.. Discord over slack .. though I have reached my 100 server limit :P
6. Guest teardowns. - Highly Encouraged.. Just that sometimes guests go very high level over their sessions which is a lot of times only mildly helpful.. Real teardowns may require longer sessions, only then they become useful. The goal of these sessions should be to get people started on their own to a good degree so that rest we can unconver from some shared reference implementation.
7. A monthly system design challenge. - Yes. Yes. Yes.. even if we are not able to submit.. hearing expert feedback on why some desin choice wins over the other helps us learn System Design in an engaging manner.
8. A reference architecture library - Yes helps to fill in things by ourselves thru experimentation, learning and from our own implemented outcomes.. but do provide the best Designed and Optimal Implementations at sometime midway not at the end of some course so that people can ask questions around that.
9. More career and interview prep - Why Not.. if you are able to give time to us.. we'll become better at this.
Count me in!!! 🫶🏽🙌🏽