Working through a lesson

Theory lessons

Rendered markdown with inline quizzes. Quizzes grade instantly with explanations, and your answers persist in progress.json. Concept sections end with “Explain it” prompts - say the answer out loud, in a minute, as if to an interviewer or customer. This verbal drilling is what turns knowledge into being conversant.

Mark theory lessons complete manually when you’re confident.

Structured practice blocks

Some lessons include first-class practice prompts between the explanation and the terminal work. They are there for the parts of technical support that cannot be reduced to a command:

• Case files collect ticket text, timelines, evidence, and deliverables before you touch the environment.
• Diagnosis checkpoints ask you to commit to likely hypotheses or next checks before the terminal can become random poking.
• Compare-and-explain drills make you choose between logs, configs, summaries, or proposed fixes and explain the safer answer.
• Written-response prompts help you turn evidence into customer updates, internal handoffs, and engineering escalations.
• Recall drills give you short interview-style review cards after the main lesson work.

These blocks are not used in every lesson. A SQL syntax concept may only need an explanation and quiz; a support ticket may need a case file, terminal work, and a written update.

Sandbox lessons

Lessons with a terminal pane run against a disposable Docker container built for that exact lesson - seeded data, broken configs, whatever the scenario needs.

• Start environment builds and launches the container (first run pulls the base image; later runs are fast). You get a real bash shell that opens where the exercise’s files live, with /work as your scratch directory for notes and answers, and nano/vim available.
• Reset destroys the container and starts a fresh one - experiments are free, and a wrecked environment costs nothing.
• Check my work runs the lesson’s validation script inside the container and reports pass/fail per checkpoint, with hints on failure. When every checkpoint passes, the lesson is marked complete automatically.

The Files tab

Next to the terminal there’s a Files tab: a browser for everything under /work in the running sandbox, with a plain textarea editor. Click a file to open it, edit, and Save (or Cmd/Ctrl+S) - changes land directly in the container, so the check script sees them just like edits made with nano or vim. Use it when wrestling a terminal editor isn’t the skill the lesson is teaching; use the terminal when it is.

Sandboxes are resource-capped (512 MB / 1 CPU), removed on exit, and never touch your host machine. The Stop server button in the top bar shuts Supercharger down cleanly and removes every running sandbox container; the server also cleans up orphaned containers the next time it starts.

Scenario tickets and finals

Scenario lessons are framed as support tickets: reproduce, diagnose, fix, document - the same arc as the real job, and the source of concrete war stories for behavioral interview questions.

The final assessment in each track is closed book: no hints, schema exploration is part of the test. Treat it like a live screen - if you pass it cold, you’ve earned the claim.