Module 1: The engineer's toolkit

No VMs yet. This module sets up the tools you'll use every single day for the rest of the course, and I put it before the fun stuff on purpose: every hour spent here pays back for sixteen modules.

Here's the uncomfortable truth this module is built on. The thing that separates engineers who grow fast from engineers who stall isn't talent, it's whether they keep notes. Six months into your lab you will hit an error you've already solved once. The person with a journal searches it, finds their own fix, and moves on in two minutes. The person without one solves it again from scratch and learns nothing new doing it. I've been both people. The journal is better.

So this module gives you a note system (Obsidian), version control for it (Git), a place it lives beyond your laptop (a hosted remote), a terminal that survives disconnects (tmux), and an AI assistant with rules (Claude). Together they're the toolkit; separately none of them is impressive.

What's in it:

• 1.1 note-taking with Markdown, the format your journal is written in
• 1.2 Obsidian and the starter vault
• 1.3 Git, the five commands that matter
• 1.4 a remote: your journal, off your laptop
• 1.5 tmux, the terminal that survives
• 1.6 Claude, with the rules that keep it useful
• 1.7 journal entry
• 1.8 checkpoint

Tier required: none. Any machine that passed checkpoint 0.6 is more than enough, and most of this works even on the 8 GB laptops I warned about. Budget a weekend if these tools are new to you.