Practitioner notes

Field Guides

Long-form guides for senior engineering and product practitioners — interview prep, deep dives, build-alongs, references, and playbooks across AI, data, product, and DeFi.

Browse by topic below. Each topic page lists the guides it contains.

AI Engineering

Building, shipping, and reasoning about AI systems — agents, MCP, RAG, evals, and the operational glue around them.

Agents MCP RAG & Evals Data Engineering

The modern data stack from a senior analytics-engineering angle — SQL, dbt, modeling, warehouses, orchestration, observability.

SQL & dbt Warehouses Modeling Data Science

Two guides grouped by archetype — product/analytics DS and full-stack/applied DS. SQL, experimentation, causal inference, production ML, feature engineering.

Experimentation Causal Inference Production ML Product Management

Senior PM interview prep for fintech and crypto product roles — platform thinking, payments, KYC/onboarding, growth funnels, regulatory product work, and stakeholder management.

Platform PM Payments Fintech / Crypto DeFi Engineering

Senior DeFi protocol and smart-contract engineering — mechanism design, AMM and lending math, Solidity at TVL-securing scale, EVM and gas mastery, formal verification, and shipping safely through audit cycles.

Solidity Mechanism Design EVM / Formal Verification Neocloud

Company-by-company profiles of the GPU-cloud industry — Vast.AI, RunPod, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Together.AI, Lambda, Hyperbolic, Nebius, TensorDock — plus a history-and-future of the neocloud category, the emerging physical compute-futures marketplaces (CME/Silicon Data, ICE/Ornn), and a comparative analysis.

GPU Cloud Neocloud Compute Futures