advanced
Rust Systems Engineering
For engineers who already ship and want the depth a backend infrastructure role actually asks for. No fundamentals, no narrative — every lesson ends in code you compile and run.
Calibrated against a real job description: Rust/C++ systems work, RPC and API services at scale, database architecture and indexing, and ownership of production infrastructure.
// tracks
Ownership, Moves & Drops
6 lessons · ~3.5hThe model the borrow checker is actually enforcing. Where a value lives, when it moves, when it is copied instead, and the exact point it is destroyed.
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Lifetimes
5 lessons · ~3hAnnotations stop being noise once you read them as a constraint between inputs and outputs. Elision, structs that hold references, 'static, and what a bound really promises.
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Traits, Generics & Dispatch
7 lessons · ~4hHow Rust reuses code without inheritance. Bounds, associated types, blanket impls, and the real cost difference between a generic and a dyn Trait.
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Errors That Survive Production
6 lessons · ~3hResult end to end: propagation, conversion, custom error types that carry cause, and an explicit policy for when a panic is correct and when it is an outage.
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Collections, Iterators & Closures
7 lessons · ~4hPicking the right container on complexity rather than habit, then expressing the transformation lazily. Includes the Fn/FnMut/FnOnce distinction that decides what a closure may capture.
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Smart Pointers & Interior Mutability
6 lessons · ~3.5hBox, Rc, RefCell, Cow and Weak — what each one buys, what it costs, and the compile-time versus runtime borrow distinction that decides which one you actually need.
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Threads, Send/Sync & Shared State
8 lessons · ~5hThe core of any RPC service under real load. Threads, the two auto traits that make sharing sound, Arc<Mutex<T>> and its alternatives, atomics with honest memory ordering, and channels.
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Async From First Principles
7 lessons · ~4.5hBuilt up from the poll loop, not down from an attribute macro. You write a Future by hand, build a working block_on with a real Waker, and only then look at what Tokio adds on top.
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Macros, Unsafe, FFI & Money
7 lessons · ~4hThe four edges a systems reviewer is expected to hold: what a derive expands to, what an unsafe block promises, what crossing into C++ costs, and why a float must never hold a balance.
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RPC Services at Scale
7 lessons · ~5hThe service in front of the network: JSON-RPC 2.0 done exactly, Serde at the edge, Tower layers for timeout and rate limiting, and the architecture questions an interview will actually ask.
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The Data Layer
7 lessons · ~5hDatabase architecture as the role describes it: indexing and query patterns first, then the Rust side — pools, transactions and prepared statements.
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Indexers & Distributed Systems
7 lessons · ~5hThe path a transaction takes from client to consensus and back, and the indexer that makes it queryable. Cursors, replay, idempotency and the failure modes that only appear at scale.
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Running It in Production
7 lessons · ~4.5hWhat separates a prototype from infrastructure someone is paged for: observability, honest percentiles, load testing, graceful shutdown and a reliability posture you can defend.
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Every exercise compiles and runs in the Forge sandbox — standard library only, no external crates.
Advanced lessons are written in English first. Portuguese lands next; Spanish and French follow.