Setup & Lab
A laptop lab (kind, Docker, free cloud tiers) and your coding agent, ready for every later phase.
Nothing in this curriculum needs a cloud account to start. It needs a Linux kernel you can reach (your own, or a VM on macOS and Windows), a container engine, a throwaway Kubernetes cluster, an infrastructure-as-code CLI, and the tutor skills in your coding agent. This phase gets you there with scripts you can rerun, so the environment is never the thing you are debugging.
How this phase is built
| Lesson | Type | What you build | What you then use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lab Doctor | Build | a probe that compares the machine against the course's requirements and prints the install plan | docker run, kind create cluster, kubectl get nodes, tofu version, npx skills add |
More lessons in this phase are listed in ROADMAP.md: a Linux VM on macOS and Windows with Lima and WSL 2, free-tier cloud accounts with spend guards, and setting up your coding agent with the tutor.
Reference layer
Per-tool installation guides live in the Reference layer: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Linux.