CodersSecret - Security, AI, Data and Production Engineering
Free engineering courses and guides on Kubernetes, SPIFFE/SPIRE, Zero Trust, production RAG, analytics engineering, DevSecOps, labs, and diagrams.
Free Production Engineering Courses
Learn workload identity, Kubernetes security, Zero Trust, DevSecOps, API security, production RAG, distributed systems, and analytics engineering through practical modules, labs, diagrams, and engineering guides.
- Master SPIFFE and SPIRE for Workload Identity - deploy SPIRE, issue SVIDs, federate trust domains, and replace long-lived secrets.
- Cloud Native Security Engineering - secure Kubernetes, containers, service mesh, policy-as-code, runtime detection, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Production RAG Systems Engineering - build reliable retrieval, vector search, AI agent, evaluation, and deployment workflows.
- Distributed Systems Engineering - learn CAP, consensus, replication, scalability, reliability, Zero Trust, observability, and Kubernetes-native architecture.
- Production Analytics Engineering with dbt - learn transformations, marts, tests, metrics, semantic layers, lineage, and data quality workflows.
Popular Engineering Topics
- Workload identity, SPIFFE, SPIRE, and mTLS
- Kubernetes runtime security, supply-chain signing, OPA policy, Falco, and eBPF detection
- Semantic layers, governed metrics, dbt lineage, and analytics engineering quality gates
- Interactive security simulators and developer cheatsheets
Latest Engineering Guides
- Are DAGs Dying? The Rise of Declarative Data Pipelines - DAGs are not dying, but task-first orchestration is changing. Learn declarative data pipelines, asset graphs, data contracts, freshness policies, and when Airflow still fits.
- Distributed Systems Algorithms: Consensus, Replication, and Coordination at Production Scale - How real distributed systems agree, replicate, and coordinate. Raft and Paxos consensus, leader election in etcd and Kafka, quorum reads in Cassandra, gossip in Redis Cluster, vector clocks, CRDTs, and the consistency models that determine what your system can promise.
- Rate Limiting Algorithms: Token Bucket, Sliding Window, and Distributed Rate Limiters in Production - How API gateways, edge proxies, and service meshes throttle traffic without breaking legitimate users. Token bucket vs leaky bucket, fixed and sliding windows, distributed rate limiting with Redis, Envoy and NGINX implementations, and adaptive rate limiting under attack.
- Caching Strategies: Cache-Aside, Write-Through, Distributed Caches, and Invalidation in Production - Every cache eventually causes an outage if you do not design it right. Cache-aside vs write-through, distributed caching with Redis and Memcached, CDN edge caching, the thundering herd, hot keys, and the invalidation strategies that hold up at scale.
- Scheduling Systems: How Kubernetes, Airflow, and Distributed Schedulers Place and Run Workloads - How real scheduling systems decide what runs where. Kubernetes scheduler internals, distributed cron, queue-based job orchestration with Airflow and Nomad, bin-packing and fairness algorithms, and the failure modes that determine whether your workloads survive node failure.
- Monorepo vs Polyrepo: How to Structure Your Codebase at Scale - Google uses a monorepo with 2 billion lines of code. Netflix uses hundreds of separate repos. Both work. Learn when each approach wins, the tooling that makes monorepos viable (Nx, Turborepo), and how to migrate without losing your mind.
- Concurrency and Parallelism: Threads, Async, and Multiprocessing in Python - The GIL does not make Python single-threaded — it makes it single-core for CPU work. Learn when to use threading (I/O), asyncio (many connections), and multiprocessing (CPU), with benchmarks showing the real performance difference.
- SQL Window Functions: The Feature That Changes How You Write Queries - Window functions let you calculate rankings, running totals, moving averages, and row comparisons without GROUP BY or self-joins. Learn ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG/LEAD, SUM OVER, and PARTITION BY with practical examples.
- Vector Databases Explained: Embeddings, Similarity Search, and When You Need One - Vector databases power semantic search, recommendation engines, and RAG pipelines. Learn how embeddings work, the HNSW algorithm behind similarity search, chunking strategies, and when pgvector is enough vs when you need Pinecone.
- Linux Commands Every Developer Should Know But Doesn't - You know ls and grep. But do you know awk, xargs, jq, strace, lsof, and ss? These commands turn a 2-hour debugging session into a 5-minute investigation. Real scenarios, real commands, real solutions.
Watch and Listen
CodersSecret is also on YouTube and Spotify, with visual tutorials and audio-first engineering explainers based on the same production backend, security, Kubernetes, AI, and data engineering topics.
Recent podcast topics include Claude token costs, OAuth authentication mistakes, and Delta Lake vs Iceberg.
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About CodersSecret
CodersSecret is written by Vishal Anand for engineers who build, secure, and operate production systems. Every course and guide is free, ad-free, and focused on real infrastructure trade-offs.