Systems Architect
The ground beneath the cloud. Amazon's own free training teaches AWS itself best, so it is part of this path: two milestone courses send you to aws.amazon.com/training at exactly the right moments, while GotchiCode teaches everything Amazon assumes you already know: networking, Linux administration, architecture principles, Terraform, containers and Kubernetes, and security. Finish ready for the Solutions Architect certification.
15 months · 12 courses
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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.
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Learn Linux
Every 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.
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Learn Networking
Every 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.
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Linux Server Administration
You 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.
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Learn Git
Every 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.
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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.
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Cloud Architecture Principles
The 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.
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Learn Terraform
Infrastructure 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.
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Containers & Kubernetes
From "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.
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Cloud Security
Architects 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.
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AWS Milestone: Architecting on AWS
The 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.
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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.