Map 8 levels · 28 techs · 5 cross-cutting tracks

The whole path

Shipyard is two paths and five cross-cutting tracks. The apprentice path (0 → 100) takes a non-coder from "what is a server" to shipping production-grade software with AI agents. The yardmaster path (100 → 140) is the operations layer — DevOps and SysOps — that lets you run what you ship at scale. Cross-cutting tracks are reference material, threaded through both paths.

Mindmap · the whole 0 → 140 path

click any node to navigate
Shipyard Apprentice level Yardmaster level Cross-cutting track
How to read this map

Two paths and five tracks

The map above puts Shipyard at the center. Around it: the eight levels, split between the two paths, and the cross-cutting tracks (Tech, Engineer Talk, Prompts, Project, References) that run alongside.

Click any node to navigate there. Hover to see what each piece is. Toggle to Tree mode if you prefer a top-down hierarchy view.

Apprentice path · 0 → 100

The first six levels — for the non-coder shipping their first real app

  1. L1 · Mental Models — what a web app actually is.
  2. L2 · Vocabulary in Context — repo, branch, commit, PR — the words engineers say.
  3. L3 · The Stack — frontend, backend, databases, auth, environments.
  4. L4 · Dev Lifecycle — local → staging → production. Git, CI/CD, DNS.
  5. L5 · Prompting AI Agents — bad prompt vs. good prompt at every stage.
  6. L6 · Production-Grade Thinking — security, errors, monitoring, postmortems.
Yardmaster path · 100 → 140

The operations layer — for keeping shipped things alive

  1. L7 · DevOps — IaC, containers, Kubernetes, deeper CI/CD with Jenkins, deploy strategies, GitOps, secrets, configuration management with Ansible, SRE basics.
  2. L8 · SysOps — Linux, networking, DNS deeper, load balancing, storage, backups, capacity, FinOps, compliance, on-call hygiene with PagerDuty, vulnerability management.
Cross-cutting tracks

Reference material that runs alongside both paths

  • Tech — 28 dedicated tech pages, each with its own focused mindmap. The Overall tab explains how the whole stack flows together.
  • Engineer Talk — 120+ jargon entries, plain English with conversation examples.
  • Prompt Library — bad vs. good prompts at every stage of building.
  • Tasklane — the running project, narrated end to end.
  • References — every external claim sourced. Official docs only.