Introduction
Learn how to stretch comp bands and become indispensable without burning out or dragging your team down.
We'll cover the following...
John’s the highest-paid engineer in the company.
He’s also perpetually OOO, moonlighting for two startups, and the only person who knows how to reboot the haunted monolith in prod.
It makes for a great meme (and hey, we’re glad you enjoyed it!) but let’s be real… John kind of sucks. He’s a bottleneck who hoards knowledge and slows everyone else down.
Your actual goal isn’t to be John: it’s to build real leverage by becoming the kind of engineer who:
Calms the chaos when legacy code is screaming.
Designs systems that scale without over-engineering.
Makes AI useful, not just novel.
Raises the bus factor, so knowledge isn’t trapped in one person’s head.
Turns invisible work into visible influence through docs, roadmaps, and decisions.
In short, we're here to help you become something better than John: John 2.0.
In this course, you’ll find:
Battle-tested techniques for high impact: Proven approaches to System Design, legacy migrations, AI integration, and reliability that actually hold up in production.
Actionable frameworks: Checklists, templates, and patterns you can drop straight into your current projects, from SLOs and observability to crisp design docs.
Leverage, not dependency: Build systems, docs, and processes that spread knowledge across your team and reduce bottlenecks.
Deep-dive links: Resources and more in-depth Educative courses so you can go further when you’re ready.
Action-oriented guidance: We'll tell you how to take next steps to apply concepts immediately and build cumulative expertise across the course.
John quests (and side quests): Apply your learnings hands-on, and create artifacts to continue working on outside of this course.
(And some fun John comics, because we all secretly love him.)
By the end of this course, you’ll know how to become the kind of engineer who’s trusted to tackle the toughest problems and design massive systems—and paid like it too.
And who knows, you may even get to take a vacation without ever having to check Slack.