Course Catalog
AWS Milestone: Architecting on AWS
AWS Milestone: Architecting on AWSThe second Amazon milestone, and the path's summit approach: with every fundamental in your pack, you take Amazon's official Solutions Architect training at aws.amazon.com/training (AWS Technical Essentials and Architecting on AWS on Skill Builder), practice it in your own account, and schedule the Solutions Architect Associate exam. These lessons pace the climb, checkpoint the AWS-specific knowledge, and map everything this path taught onto the exam's domains.
AWS Milestone: Cloud Practitioner Essentials
A milestone, not a GotchiCode course: here you take Amazon's own free AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials at aws.amazon.com/training. Amazon teaches its cloud best, so this path does not reteach it. These lessons get your AWS account and billing alarm set up, point you at the exact course to enroll in, and checkpoint what you learned there before the path moves into deeper architecture.
Build a Bookbot in Python
Build a Bookbot in PythonBuild an archivist-bot that reads the chronicles of the Codeweald and reports on them, one pure function at a time. You'll load scroll text, count words and lines, tally characters, rank word frequencies, and assemble it all into a full text-analysis report, the same skills that power real log analyzers and search tools, practiced on dusty scrolls.
Build a Maze Solver in Python
Map the Warren, the tangle of tunnels under the Codeweald, by building a real maze solver, one pure function at a time. You'll represent mazes as grids, find walkable neighbors, run breadth-first search with a parent map, reconstruct the shortest path, and render the route onto the map. The same algorithm powers GPS routing and game AI pathfinding; you'll own every line of it.
Build a Static Site Generator in Python
Publish the Codeweald Almanac by building a real static site generator, the kind of tool that powers thousands of blogs and docs sites. You'll model rich text as nodes, render HTML with proper attributes, parse inline markdown with splits and regex, classify and convert block elements, pour pages into a template, and wire it all into a generator that turns a folder of markdown into a website. Every line is yours.
Build Asteroids in JavaScript
Build Asteroids in JavaScriptBuild the classic arcade game Asteroids, one pure function at a time. You'll write the real logic that powers the Gotchi Asteroids cabinet: the game loop, 2D vectors, a ship with thrust and drag, bullets, splitting asteroids, circle collisions, and score/lives/waves, all as small, testable functions. Finish the course and the arcade cabinet unlocks: the game you play is the game you built.
Build Gotchi 2048 in JavaScript
Build a snack-merging 2048 puzzle, one pure function at a time. Crumbs combine into cookies, cookies into donuts, donuts into cakes, and you'll write every rule: sliding and merging a row, the transpose trick that turns one move function into all four directions, random tile spawning, and game-over detection. No physics, no timers: pure logic, the most test-friendly game in the arcade, and a beautiful lesson in code reuse. Finish the course and the Gotchi 2048 cabinet unlocks: the game you play is the game you built.
Build Gotchi Hop in JavaScript
Build a flappy-style arcade game, one pure function at a time. Your Gotchi hops between scrolling pipes, and you'll write every piece of the real logic: gravity and flapping, a scrolling world, randomly placed gaps, rectangle hitboxes, scoring, and rising difficulty. It's a gentler first game than Asteroids: one dimension of physics, no vectors, quick rounds. Finish the course and the Gotchi Hop cabinet unlocks in the arcade: the game you play is the game you built.
Build Gotchi Invaders in JavaScript
Build a Space-Invaders-style shooter, one pure function at a time. Rows of glitch-bugs march across the screen, drop closer with every bounce, and rain bombs on your Gotchi's cannon, and you'll write all of it: the marching formation as a grid of arrays, two-way projectiles, immutable hit resolution, and waves that get meaner as they shrink. A natural next step after Build Asteroids: the same tick-by-tick thinking, applied to a whole army at once. Finish the course and the Gotchi Invaders cabinet unlocks in the arcade: the game you play is the game you built.
Cloud Architecture Principles
Cloud Architecture PrinciplesThe design thinking Amazon's training assumes. Building on AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials (the milestone right before this course), learn the principles that turn a service catalog into good systems: scaling out versus up, statelessness, the nines, single points of failure, fault tolerance, multi-AZ and multi-region trade-offs, disaster recovery, cost as a design force, and how to reason about trade-offs the way the Well-Architected reviews and the exam expect.
Cloud Security
Cloud SecurityArchitects spend more time on security than they expect. Building on the IAM basics from your Essentials milestone, learn to think in blast radius: reading and evaluating policies, least privilege as a practice, roles and federation, encryption at rest and in transit, KMS, secrets management, security groups versus NACLs, and zero trust. The last fundamentals course before the Architecting on AWS milestone.
Containers & Kubernetes
Containers & KubernetesFrom "works on my machine" to works everywhere. What images and containers actually are, writing real Dockerfiles and compose files, registries, then up the ladder to Kubernetes: pods, deployments, services and the desired-state loop, and how ECS, EKS and Fargate package it all on AWS. You author the real artifacts; graded checks verify their structure line by line.
Find Your First Dev Job
The quest after the quests: turning your new skills into a paid seat at a guild. How hiring actually works, resumes that survive six-second scans, portfolios and GitHub profiles that do the talking, networking without the cringe, surviving technical and behavioral interviews, and reading an offer before you sign it. Straight talk about the junior market, quizzed as you go.
Learn Cryptography in Go
Learn Cryptography in GoThe Cipher Wars have begun. Learn cryptography from first principles by securing the Codeweald's messages in Go, from paper-and-pencil ciphers you break yourself, through XOR, hashing, HMAC and AES, all the way to the number theory behind key exchange and RSA. Recommended after Learn Go (through the structs and errors chapters).
Learn Data Structures & Algorithms in Python
The Codeweald is vast, and a ranger who searches it creature by creature will be out there all winter. Learn to think in algorithms: measure work with Big-O, master the classic sorts and searches, and build stacks, queues, linked lists, trees, hash maps, tries and graphs from scratch, ending with an encounter-finder that navigates the whole sanctuary. Assumes you've finished Learn to Code in Python (or know functions, loops, lists, dicts, classes and recursion).
Learn DSA 2 in Python
The advanced expedition. Build heaps and priority queues from scratch, rebalance trees with rotations, master union-find with path compression, route weighted graphs with Dijkstra, schedule with topological sort, span networks with Kruskal, and conquer dynamic programming from memoization to the classic LCS, knapsack and edit-distance tables, ending with the Wardstone Network capstone. Recommended after Learn Data Structures & Algorithms in Python.
Learn Functional Programming in Python
Step into the Spellworks, the Codeweald's enchantment workshop, and learn to build programs as pipelines of pure functions. Immutability, higher-order functions, map/filter/reduce, closures, composition, currying, decorators, sum types, lazy generators and errors-as-values, assembled into a full production line in the capstone. Recommended after Learn to Code in Python (through the Lambdas chapter).
Learn Git
Learn GitEvery expedition into the Codeweald keeps a chronicle, and the chronicle keeper's tool is git. Learn to snapshot your work, read and rewrite history, branch and merge fearlessly, untangle conflicts, and publish to a shared chronicle. Real git, real repositories, graded on the spot.
Learn Git 2
You kept one den's chronicle; now the Wardens' Guild names you Chronicle-Master of them all. Learn Git 2 picks up where Learn Git ends: rebasing and retelling history, squashing and cherry-picking, hunting bugs with bisect, guarding commits with hooks, mailing patches, resurrecting lost work, and running a two-remote guild workflow. Real git, real repositories, graded on the spot. Finish Learn Git first.
Learn Go by Building a Battler
Learn Go the way it's meant to be used: by shipping something. You'll build a command-line creature battler from the ground up (types, structs, interfaces, errors and a battle loop), one compiled, tested step at a time.
Learn JavaScript by Building a Battler
Learn JavaScript the way it's actually used: by shipping something. You'll rebuild the creature battler in Node (values and variables, strings, control flow, arrays and objects, the functional toolkit (map/filter/reduce), error handling and classes) one tested step at a time, ending in a playable battle simulator.
Learn Linux
Learn LinuxEvery Codeweald ranger needs a field station, and every field station runs on the command line. Learn to navigate the filesystem, wrangle battle logs with pipes and filters, master grep, sed and awk, and finish with a real log-triage toolkit. Bring your own terminal: the gotchi CLI checks your work in your own real shell, command by command.
Learn Networking
Learn NetworkingEvery den in the Codeweald talks to every other den, and something has to carry those messages. Learn how networks actually work: IP addresses and CIDR blocks, routing, DNS, TCP and UDP, HTTP and TLS, NAT, firewalls and load balancers. You will read real command output, do real subnet math, and finish with the exact vocabulary AWS assumes you already have.
Learn OOP in Python
The war is over, and retired battle-creatures need a home. Build the Den Keeper's sanctuary-management system while mastering object-oriented design: encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction, composition, dunder methods and mixins, capped with a full multi-class capstone. Recommended after Learn to Code in Python (through the Classes chapter).
Learn PowerShell
Learn PowerShellThe command line that thinks in objects. Start from your very first command and learn variables, cmdlets, conditions, arrays, loops, hashtables and functions, then meet the pipeline that makes PowerShell famous: filtering, shaping and measuring whole collections of objects in a single line. Finish by building a working battle engine for your gotchi. No Windows machine required: everything runs in the browser.
Learn Rust
Learn RustDeep in the Codeweald stands the Gotchi Forge, where creature companions are smithed from raw sparks. Learn Rust the forge way (ownership and borrowing, structs and enums, pattern matching, Option and Result, generics, traits, lifetimes, closures and iterators) and finish by assembling a battle-ready forge of your own. Real rustc, graded on the spot.
Learn SQL
Learn SQLThe Codeweald keeps its records in the Warden's Ledger: a real SQLite database of sprites, dens and rangers. Learn to ask it questions with SELECT, shape it with CREATE and INSERT, and join its tables into real reports. Every query you write runs against a live database and is graded on the spot.
Learn Terraform
Learn TerraformInfrastructure as code, for real: write Terraform configurations and watch a genuine plan/apply cycle grade your work. HCL syntax, variables and outputs, dependencies, count and for_each, state, and modules, then how CloudFormation and CDK map onto what you know. Your exercises run on the Terraform-compatible OpenTofu engine in a sandboxed environment, the same workflow you will use against real clouds.
Learn to Code in Python
Learn Python by building a game. Across the course you'll write a complete command-line creature battler (stats, moves, type matchups and a battle loop), picking up every core Python skill as you go.
Linux Server Administration
Linux Server AdministrationYou can drive the command line; now learn to keep the machine itself healthy. SSH and keys, users and groups, packages, systemd services, journald logs, disks and mounts, processes and signals: the working toolkit of a Linux server administrator, taught on the kind of real command output you will read every day on real servers, cloud included.
PowerShell Scripting & Automation
Turn one-liners into tools. Build real scripts with parameter blocks and validation, wrangle files, CSV and JSON, hunt through text with regular expressions, and learn the error-handling and idempotency habits that separate a script you ran once from automation you can trust. Ends with a complete log-triage tool for the Codeweald fleet.
Windows Administration
Windows AdministrationHow Windows actually works, for people who will run it. Users and groups, NTFS permissions, services, processes, the registry, event logs, networking, storage and updates, taught concept-first and practiced by auditing real exported data with PowerShell: service dumps, event logs, permission reports. Finish with a full sick-server troubleshooting capstone.