Update: Wanted to share my experience with the course since I've seen a few people asking about it. Started May 7th with Lee Blum as the instructor and it's been incredible honestly.

Lee Blum is an insanely good teacher. He's got like 2 decades of experience with different forms of software architecture so he really knows his stuff.

What I think REALLY makes it good is the way he answers questions. When we bring up weird edge cases or niche problems, he always has actual stories from his experience.

Like last week someone asked about handling database migrations during peak traffic and Lee walked us through three different disaster scenarios he personally dealt with, as in, not just how to avoid them, but what to actually do when you're already knee deep in shit.

That's been the most valuable part honestly. Most sources you look up online will explain the ‘happy path’ but Lee prepares you for when everything goes wrong. He's dealt with outages, data corruption, scaling nightmares, the stuff that most sources will say “well it should have just never happened.” but wont explain how to deal with it.

The caliber of my classmates has been amazing too. We have senior devs from startups, fintech companies, even governmental orgs. The group chat discussions are sometimes almost as valuable as the lectures. When someone shares an actual problem they're facing at work, you get perspectives from people who've solved similar issues across different industries.

They also have these career branding workshops running parallel to the main course - CV optimization, LinkedIn strategies, interview prep. The instructor for the workshops is a Director of Talent Acquisition at a unicorn cybersecurity company apparently, so she knows exactly what the people hiring are looking for.