CrackingWalnuts
More than interview prep. Your path forks at Senior, into building (IC) or leading (management). Pick a goal, see the real bar, and follow the exact path to get there.
Built by Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, and Engineering Leaders who've built systems, led teams, and hired engineers.
The bar for each level is the real one, not generic advice.
Pick a level and be honest. Could you actually answer each of these out loud, right now? If several are shaky, that is the gap, and that is exactly what the path is for.
The bar: Design across services, make and defend trade-offs, and lead a design review.
If several are shaky, you are probably not there yet. Here is the path.
See the Senior Engineer pathWhether you are building LLM systems or getting grilled on them, go deep: the foundations, the engineering, the security, and the AI system design round. Read a full lesson free before you decide.
The most horizontal job in engineering: their cloud, their data, their security review, and their politics, on the same Tuesday. Median base $173,816 across global roles, and zero percent of postings carry a sales quota. Exactly one real decomposition question circulates publicly. We wrote the other ten.
When we started Cracking Walnuts, it was free and pretty small. It isn’t small anymore.
Engineers from almost every country use it now, and honestly, we never imagined it would reach this many people. We want to keep building it for years, not months, and keeping everything free doesn’t let us do that. So we’re moving to a membership.
One membership. Every learning track. Every future update. Everything you need to grow from interview preparation to senior engineering and leadership.
Every topic gets real work behind it. We research it carefully and keep it updated as the field moves, when frameworks evolve, system internals change, or interview expectations shift. You’re joining a platform that keeps getting better, not one that’s published once and left behind.
As a member you get everything available today, plus everything we build while you’re with us. We’re keeping a good part of the site free too, so you can decide it’s worth it before subscribing.
If it helps you become a better engineer, it pays for itself.
We’ve got a lot planned, and we’re excited for what’s ahead.
A limited number of memberships. Save $34.
One yearly plan. No auto-renew.
Now we also crack a few walnuts out loud, on video. Everything here stays right where it is.
ChatGPT system design, end to end: the inference engine (prefill, decode, KV-cache), context memory, RAG, tool calling, streaming, and RLHF alignment.