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.

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.