Milestone gates
Blocking checkpoints, not decorative progress. Fail the gate, remediate, then continue.
| Gate | Week | You must be able to show |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Week 6 | Course repo · weekly tracker · Dockerized service · diagnostic report |
| 2 | Week 18 | Explain eigenvalues, SVD, norms, condition numbers; implement basic numerical routines |
| 3 | Week 30 | Derive basic gradients; explain MLE/MAP; implement hypothesis tests + bootstrap CIs; explain power/MDE |
| 4 | Week 45 | Completed all engineering primitives (retrieval, rate limiting, caching, chunking, PII, metrics, resilience, sketches, routing) |
| 5 | Week 57 | Completed system design case studies with requirements, API, data model, scaling, trade-offs, failure modes |
| 6 | Week 69 | A/B analysis tool, bootstrap tool, SRM detector, feature flag engine, experiment assignment, monitoring plan |
| 7 | Week 81 | RAG retrieval pipeline, retrieval evaluation report, prompt system, memory system, agent prototype |
| 8 | Week 93 | Deployed vLLM or SGLang, benchmark methodology, observability dashboard, quantization report, speculative decoding report, inference cost model |
| 9 | Week 102 | Working production AI platform: router, quotas, tracing, logging, idempotency, work queue, model registry, cost attribution, safety filters |
| 10 | Week 108 | Completed capstone, published portfolio, passed mock interviews, behavioral stories, 30-day job-search plan |
Official write-up: https://sethuiyer.github.io/tensor-to-tenant/gates/.
Back to the syllabus.