FDE Foundations: From Learning to Customer Delivery
Eight chapters · version 1.0. This introductory course is not accreditation or a substitute for production-engineering experience.
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COURSE HANDBOOK · VERSION 1.0
Foundations and Applied Practice
56 pages · 8 chapters · 32 lessons · 16 exercises · an integrated capstone, glossary and references.
Supplementary self-study edition, including its own answer explanations. Your saved chapter progress and scored quizzes stay unchanged. The handbook requires qualified instructor review before commercial publication.
Milestone 1 · Discovery and programming basics
CHAPTER 1 · THREE LESSONS · TWO EXERCISES
The FDE role and customer problem discovery
- Discover before building
- Measure the outcome
- Scope the first delivery
Portfolio: Customer discovery brief with baseline, scope and pilot criteria.
Open chapter 1 →CHAPTER 2 · THREE LESSONS · TWO EXERCISES
Programming fundamentals, Git, and debugging
- Functions and data
- Git as a change record
- Debugging and unit tests
Portfolio: Small repository with validation, tests and a debugging note.
Open chapter 2 →
Milestone 2 · Data, solution design, and integration
CHAPTER 3 · THREE LESSONS · TWO EXERCISES
SQL, data quality, APIs, and authentication
- SQL and joins
- Data quality and contracts
- APIs and authentication
Portfolio: Data importer plus SQL analysis and data-quality report.
Open chapter 3 →CHAPTER 4 · THREE LESSONS · TWO EXERCISES
Solution design and enterprise integration
- Design from constraints
- Synchronous and asynchronous work
- Failure and reconciliation
Portfolio: Annotated architecture and integration failure plan.
Open chapter 4 →
Milestone 3 · Applied AI systems
CHAPTER 5 · THREE LESSONS · TWO EXERCISES
LLM fundamentals, RAG, and evaluation
- LLMs and uncertainty
- Retrieval with citations
- Evaluation and failure analysis
Portfolio: Cited retrieval prototype and evaluation evidence.
Open chapter 5 →CHAPTER 6 · THREE LESSONS · TWO EXERCISES
Agents, tool use, and human oversight
- Tools are explicit capabilities
- Human approval and audit
- Bounded loops and safety
Portfolio: Tool contracts, approval flow and agent safety test log.
Open chapter 6 →
Milestone 4 · Delivery, adoption, and capstone
CHAPTER 7 · THREE LESSONS · TWO EXERCISES
Deployment, security, testing, and monitoring
- Deploy a bounded service
- Testing security and reliability
- Monitor and roll back
Portfolio: Deployment guide, permission-test evidence and rollback runbook.
Open chapter 7 →CHAPTER 8 · THREE LESSONS · TWO EXERCISES
Customer demos, adoption, handover, and capstone
- Demo the workflow, not a promise
- Handover and adoption
- Capstone evidence and review
Portfolio: Seven-part capstone: discovery, architecture, implementation, tests, deployment, demo/handover, and success measures.
Open chapter 8 →