These items support the Master Developer pages. Read the official docs for the ideas, then practise in a small project of your own. Hours are estimates. Links were checked when this list was made.
Week 1
Platform: IDP and catalog
- What is Backstage? — Backstage (CNCF). Docs, about 0.5 h. Shows the developer-portal idea, so you can say fairly when a portal is worth running.
- CNCF Cloud Native Landscape — CNCF. Reference, about 0.5 h. A map of open source cloud tools. A good place to search for rung (a) of the ladder.
- Renovate documentation: overview — Renovate (Mend). Docs, about 0.5 h. How a bot proposes dependency and upstream updates.
GitOps
- OpenGitOps: the four principles — OpenGitOps (CNCF). Docs, about 0.5 h. The short, vendor-neutral definition of GitOps: declarative, versioned, pulled automatically, continuously reconciled.
- Argo CD documentation: overview — Argo CD project. Docs, about 0.5 h. The official guide to a popular tool that delivers applications from git to a cluster.
Platform: registry and security
- Harbor documentation — Harbor (CNCF). Docs, about 1 h. How a container registry stores, scans and signs images.
- DefectDojo documentation — DefectDojo. Docs, about 1 h. How security findings from many scanners are gathered in one place.
Week 2
OSS and licences
- Choose a License — GitHub (choosealicense.com). Reference, about 0.5 h. A plain summary of the common open source licences and what each lets you do.
- Open Source Initiative: approved licences — Open Source Initiative. Reference, about 0.5 h. The official list of licences that count as open source. Source-available licences are not on it.
- SPDX License List — SPDX (Linux Foundation). Reference, about 0.5 h. The standard short ids (MIT, Apache-2.0, AGPL-3.0-only) used in decision records and licence checks.
- Open Source Guides: legal side of open source — GitHub Open Source Guides. Article, about 0.5 h. A friendly guide to licences, trademarks and what contributing means.
- REUSE: licence and copyright information in every file — FSFE. Docs, about 0.5 h. A simple convention and tool for marking the licence of each file, so a scan can read it.
- SPDX: what is an SBOM and the specification — SPDX (Linux Foundation). Docs, about 1 h. The open standard for the software bill of materials that a pipeline can produce.
- OpenSSF Scorecard — OpenSSF. Tool, about 0.5 h. An automatic health check of an open source project. A fair input to a scorecard.
- Trivy documentation — Aqua Security (open source). Docs, about 1 h. A scanner for vulnerabilities, licences and bills of materials that a pipeline can use.
Week 3
GitOps
- Argo CD: automated sync policy (prune and selfHeal) — Argo CD project. Docs, about 0.5 h. Explains the two switches that make git the only way to change a cluster.
- Argo CD: getting started — Argo CD project. Docs, about 1.5 h. Walks through an Application from first sync to a diff.
- External Secrets Operator documentation — External Secrets. Docs, about 1 h. How secrets come from a vault into a cluster, so no secret lives in git.
- SOPS documentation — SOPS (CNCF). Docs, about 0.5 h. How a file can be committed encrypted, with only the values hidden.
IaC
- Terraform documentation — HashiCorp. Docs, about 1 h. The reference for declaring cloud resources as code.
- Terraform tutorials (HashiCorp Developer) — HashiCorp. Course, about 6 h. Free, hands-on tutorials: state, modules, plan and apply.
- OpenTofu documentation — OpenTofu (Linux Foundation). Docs, about 1 h. The open source fork of Terraform. Same language, open licence.
- Kustomize: official guide — Kubernetes SIGs. Docs, about 1 h. Base and overlay manifests without templates.
- Helm documentation — Helm (CNCF). Docs, about 1.5 h. The package manager for Kubernetes. Know it, because many upstream projects ship charts.
Patch-forks
- Renovate: custom regex manager — Renovate (Mend). Docs, about 1 h. How Renovate can read a pin file and open the update merge request.
Week 4
ITIL and service management
- ITIL (AXELOS / PeopleCert): about ITIL 4 — PeopleCert / AXELOS. Docs, about 0.5 h. The owner’s overview of the ITIL 4 framework and its practices.
- GitLab merge trains — GitLab Docs. Docs, about 0.5 h. How GitLab tests each merge request on top of the queue before it merges. Part of change enablement.
- GitLab Code Owners — GitLab Docs. Docs, about 0.5 h. How an approver rule in git plays the role of a change advisory board.
SRE and service levels
- Google SRE book: Service Level Objectives — Google SRE. Article, about 1 h. Free chapter on indicators, objectives and agreements. A base for service level sheets.
- Google SRE book: Embracing Risk (error budgets) — Google SRE. Article, about 1 h. Why 100 percent is the wrong target, and how an error budget turns reliability into a decision.
- Google SRE book: Postmortem Culture — Google SRE. Article, about 0.5 h. How to write a blameless review. A base for incident reviews.
Patch-forks
- Open Source Guides: how to contribute (upstream PRs) — GitHub Open Source Guides. Article, about 0.5 h. How to send a patch upstream so a patch set shrinks over time.
GitOps
- CloudNativePG documentation — CloudNativePG (CNCF). Docs, about 1 h. How PostgreSQL clusters can be declared, backed up and recovered from git.
