First Principles

A series of build-it-to-learn-it textbooks, each reasoned from first principles. Some books you read; these you build.

The books

• ₿ Bitcoin · First Principles — how untrusting strangers agree on one ledger.
• Ξ Ethereum · First Principles — how untrusting strangers agree on a shared world computer, and what it costs to run one.
• ◎ Solana · First Principles — how to build one global state machine that runs at hardware speed without falling apart.
• 🏗️ System Design · First Principles — what does this control buy us, and what does it cost?
• ⚙️ DevOps · First Principles — what manual, error-prone step does this remove?
• 🧪 Software Testing · First Principles — how do you earn justified confidence software works, and think about the edge cases that break it?
• 🧠 AI Systems · First Principles — what does this cost in latency, memory & dollars — and how do we make it cheaper?
• 🦀 Rust · Project-First — the base path: master Rust by building 7 real, runnable projects.
• 🚀 Rust · In Production — the advanced path: take one real app (an AI-assisted blog) from cargo new to Kubernetes — Astro on Rust, AI, Redis, Docker, observability, and a profiling pass.
• ⚡ Rust + AI · Project-First — learn both by building seven products: grounded ads, cited RAG, multimodal incidents, video reasoning, a safe agent, a model lab, and the Mosaic platform.

Beyond code

First principles aren’t only for code.

• 🎯 Self-Mastery · First Principles — sharpen attention, read people, build discipline, and keep improving: one connected system, practiced (cold shower, day one).
• 🧭 Management & Communication · First Principles — how to turn a group of people and a goal into reliable outcomes, in an IT team or any company: communication, projects, teams, and how big orgs really work.

Learning paths

Prefer a guided route? Each path is an ordered walk across two or three books:

• The Web3 Path → — why BTC, ETH & SOL exist, then build all three in miniature. (Bitcoin → Rust)
• The AI Path → — how models run and cost, how to design around them, then build reliable multimodal harnesses in Rust. (AI Systems → System Design → Rust AI Engineering)
• The Systems Path → — design real systems, then ship and run them in production. (System Design → DevOps)
• Getting Started → — new to all of this? Start here.

See all learning paths for the full itineraries.