Track 1: Programming Fundamentals

Your entry point into the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) Courseline.

What This Track Covers

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) means being the engineer who sits with a customer, understands their messy real-world problem, and builds working software for it, fast, often solo, often with AI tools doing a lot of the typing. Every skill later in this Courseline (agentic AI, system design, backend, fullstack) assumes you can already read a problem, break it into logical steps, and turn that into working code with an AI coding assistant at your side.

That's what this track builds. You'll go from "I've never opened a terminal" to "I can write a function, loop over data, and solve a structured coding problem, with an AI assistant helping me, not replacing my thinking." Nothing here is FDE-specific yet (that starts in Track 9). This is the general-purpose coding foundation every other track stands on.

Why This, Why Now

FDEs don't get to say "that's not my job"; one week you're debugging a customer's shell script, the next you're writing a Python function to reshape their data, the next you're tracing a loop that's producing the wrong output at 11 pm before a demo. None of that is possible without fluency in the basics: navigating a filesystem, understanding how a program actually executes step by step, writing functions instead of copy-pasted blocks, and knowing enough about data structures to reason about whether your code will still work when the customer's dataset is 100x bigger. This track builds that fluency deliberately, in order, so you're not learning it for the first time under deadline pressure in front of a customer.

Prerequisites

None. This is the entry point to the entire FDE path. You do not need any prior coding experience. If you've dabbled in code before (even if you're currently around SDE Level 1), you can still start here — the early modules will move quickly for you, and the later ones will fill real gaps.

The Submodules, In Order

Each module builds directly on the one before it. Don't skip ahead — the "AI-assisted" framing in each module assumes you already have the muscle memory from the previous one.

1. FDE 1.01 — Git, Linux & CLI Essentials for AI-Assisted Development (Core). Before you write a single line of "real" code, you need a workspace: a terminal you're not afraid of, a filesystem you can navigate, and Git so your work is never one accident away from being lost. This module also sets up the AI coding assistant you'll use for the rest of the track.
2. FDE 1.02 — Thinking with AI: Logic, Loops & Control Flow (Core): The first real programming module. You'll learn how computers make decisions (if/else) and repeat work (loops), and, just as importantly, how to think in these terms before asking an AI assistant to write the code, so you can tell whether what it gives you back is actually correct.
3. FDE 1.03 — Code Smarter with AI: Functions & Arrays (Core): Once you can write a working block of logic, the next skill is not repeating yourself. You'll learn to package logic into reusable functions and organise collections of data into arrays/lists, the two building blocks almost all real code is made of.
4. FDE 1.04 — Intermediate DSA: AI-Assisted Problem Solving (Core): The capstone of this track. You'll apply everything- logic, loops, functions, arrays- to structured coding problems the way you'd encounter them in practice or in an interview, using an AI assistant as a thinking partner rather than an answer key.

What to Expect

• Time investment: Budget roughly 15–25 hours total across all four modules if you're a true beginner (less if you already have some coding background). Each module is designed to be worked through over a few sittings, not in one long session; this is a marathon, not a sprint.
• What "done" looks like: By the end of this track, you should be able to open a terminal without hesitating, write a multi-step program using conditionals and loops, break a problem into functions, work comfortably with arrays/lists, and solve a moderate coding problem with an AI assistant's help, understanding why the solution works, not just pasting what the AI gave you.
• What's next: Track 2 (Agentic AI) assumes you can code. It shifts focus from "how do I write a program" to "how do I build and reason about AI agents", a shift that only makes sense once the fundamentals here are solid.

Is This Track for You?

Check the boxes that apply — you don't need all of them checked to start, but if most are unchecked, you're exactly who this track was built for.

• [ ] I have never written a program before, or only followed a tutorial once or twice.
• [ ] I don't know what a terminal/command line is, or I avoid using one.
• [ ] I've coded before, but I'm not confident with loops, functions, or basic data structures.
• [ ] I'm comfortable with basic coding but want a refresher before diving into AI-assisted and FDE-specific work.
• [ ] I want to learn to code with an AI assistant, not just have it write code for me.

If any of these sound like you, start with FDE 1.01. There's no faster path; the modules are ordered exactly so you never hit a wall of unexplained assumptions.