Tech roles beyond coding

Stage 2 of 7 · 10 lessons · ~4 weeks

Technical literacy

How software is built, how the web and APIs work, and enough Git, JSON and SQL to read what engineers produce. You will not become an engineer, but you will stop being lost in technical conversations.

Start: How software is built: the lifecycle

Lessons· one lesson for each topic, in this order

  1. 1How software is built: the lifecycle
  2. 2Agile, sprints, tickets and boards
  3. 3Clients, servers and how the web works
  4. 4HTTP, APIs and status codes
  5. 5Reading JSON and API responses
  6. 6Git, GitHub and pull requests
  7. 7Reading code without writing much
  8. 8Data basics and simple SQL
  9. 9Spreadsheets for analysis
  10. 10Environments, releases, feature flags and incidents

Do this

  • Call a public API in Postman, read the JSON response and note what each field means.
  • Trigger a 401 and a 404 on purpose and write down what they mean.
  • Complete a beginner Git course and open a pull request on a practice repository.
  • Write five SQL queries on a sample dataset, including a GROUP BY and a JOIN.
  • Read one real pull request in an open source project and summarise the change in two sentences.
  • Draw how a product you use works, from the app to the server to the database.

Start with· follow one of these

  • VideoFree
    Crash Course Computer Science

    CrashCourse · Beginner

    Short free videos on how computers, networks and software work, pitched at beginners

  • CourseFree
    Select Star SQL

    Zi Chong Kao · Beginner

    A free interactive SQL tutorial on real data, enough for product and docs analytics

Practise

Keep handy

  • MDN: HTTP

    Clear reference for HTTP methods, headers and status codes

  • Learn OpenAPI

    See how an API is described formally, which all three roles meet at work

Also worth your time

Before moving on: A short technical literacy notebook: five real API calls made in Postman with notes on each response, three SQL queries on a sample dataset, one pull request opened on a practice repository, and a one-page explanation of how a product you use works from client to server.

Tauseef's advice
Engineers quickly notice whether you have done the basics yourself. Make real API calls, open a real pull request and write a few queries. You will ask better questions within weeks, and that is what earns trust.

Mark this stage as not done?