Index Ai Academy
Phase 11 of 12 · about 10 hours of study

Professional practice

Design, ship and run real systems, work well in a team, and get hired. 13 lessons, about 10 hours of study, in four tracks. One lesson is free to try without an account: the first, System design fundamentals. The rest need a free account.

Start with System design fundamentals Create a free account

What you'll learn

System design · 3 lessons, about 2.5 hours

  1. System design fundamentals FreeRequirements, rough numbers, the standard parts and where systems break.
  2. Caches, queues and background jobsSpeed reads with caches, and move slow work to queues that retry safely.
  3. Designing AI systemsLatency, cost, routing, fallbacks and guardrails for features built on models.

Shipping · 3 lessons, about 2.5 hours

  1. Containers and deploymentPackage an app as an image, configure it with the environment, and roll out safely.
  2. CI/CD pipelinesTest every change automatically, and ship with gates, flags and rollbacks.
  3. Reliability and incidentsSLOs, error budgets, alerts, on-call and blameless postmortems.

Working in a team · 4 lessons, about 3 hours

  1. Git for teamsBranches, pull requests, rebasing and how a three-way merge finds conflicts.
  2. Code reviewWhat to look for, how to give and take feedback, and automating the routine checks.
  3. Reading unfamiliar codeFind your way around a big codebase fast, with tools that map it for you.
  4. Working with AI coding toolsGive agents good context, keep tasks small, and check every change they make.

Career · 3 lessons, about 2.5 hours

  1. Writing for engineersREADMEs, design docs, commit messages and bug reports people can act on.
  2. Interviews and your portfolioShow your work, and solve interview problems the way professionals do.
  3. Capstone: ship a production AI serviceAn AI-backed service with validation, caching, rate limits, fallbacks, logging and evals.

Before you start

Lessons here build on earlier phases:

The placement test can mark off what you already know, so you only study what's new to you.

What you'll build

Ship a production AI service

An AI-backed service with validation, caching, rate limits, fallbacks, logging and evals. Read the tutorial.

  • Combine authentication, rate limiting, validation, caching, fallbacks and logging in one service
  • Treat model output as untrusted: parse it, check it against allowed values, and fall back
  • Log every request in a structured way, without keys or customer text

When you finish

Finish every lesson in this phase, or show you know it in the placement test, and you earn a certificate of completion, "Professional practice (Phase 11)", with its own link you can share.