A small studio writing the field guidewe wish we'd had.
Skill Trek is a roadmap and writing studio for working engineers. Eleven people, four countries, one editorial bar — published in public, free to read, and built by practitioners who still ship.
The internet has enough tutorials. It needs more maps.
The path from "curious" to "actually employable" is buried under millions of fragmented blog posts, course-mill videos, and engagement-farming Twitter threads. Most of them aren't wrong. They're just not connected.
We started Skill Trek because we kept watching people we cared about — younger engineers, friends switching careers, even peers picking up new specializations — bounce between resources that didn't tell them what came next, what to skip, or what would still matter in eighteen months.
What we're building is the opposite of a course-mill. Roadmaps with point-of-view, written by people who've shipped the thing. Essays with no SEO filler, no hype, no engagement bait. One newsletter a week. That's it. We're not in a hurry to be bigger.
If we do this well, somewhere, someone will pick a roadmap, walk through it, ship the capstone, and land the job they were aiming at. That's the point. Everything else is decoration.
Connected beats complete.
A roadmap that takes you from A to Z with twelve resources beats a curriculum with two hundred. Curation is the value.
Practitioners only.
Every roadmap is authored or reviewed by someone who's shipped the work in production within the last two years. No exceptions.
Free is the bar.
The roadmaps and the writing are free, ad-free, and tracker-light. The newsletter pays for itself with sponsorships we'd actually read.
Take a position.
"It depends" is rarely the most useful answer. We say what we'd do, why, and where the answer might change.
The practitioners behind it.
Eleven people. Each one ships in their domain — and writes about it from the inside.
Aanya Rao
Hired ~80 AI engineers across two companies before this. Writes about careers, hiring, and the stuff that doesn't fit on LinkedIn.
Daniel Kim
Built RAG and eval systems at scale. Authors most of the AI Engineer roadmap and writes the deep-dives on retrieval and agents.
Priya Mehta
Maintains the Python and DevOps roadmaps. Spent a decade on platform teams before deciding she'd rather teach the playbook.
Jamie Liu
Authors the cybersecurity roadmap. Spent six years on red and blue teams. Believes most security writing is either too vague or too smug.
Sam Okonkwo
Designs the site, the typography system, and the interactive roadmap views. Co-authors the Frontend Engineer roadmap.
Miguel Kahn
Runs the data side of the studio — job-market studies, comp analyses, tracking what the field is actually doing.
Lior Friedman
Reviews every roadmap before it ships. Cuts a third of the words and triples the clarity. Writes the Sunday newsletter.
Four more
The rest of the team handles operations, contributor editing, and platform engineering. We hire roughly two people per year.
Two years. Slow on purpose.
A short version of how we got here. We never raised more than we needed and we publish on a real cadence, not a frantic one.
An idea, a Notion doc
Aanya and Daniel wrote a one-page essay about why most learning paths for AI engineers were broken. It got passed around enough that they decided to build the thing instead of complaining about it.
First roadmap published
The original AI Engineer roadmap shipped with seven stages. It's been rewritten three times since. Most of the spine is the same.
10k subscribers
The newsletter passed 10,000 subscribers without a single paid promotion. We took it as the signal we needed to hire.
Seed round, on our terms
$2.4M seed from a small group of operator-investors who use the roadmaps themselves. No board observer rights, no publishing pressure.
Twelve roadmaps live
Full coverage across AI, Python, Cyber, Frontend, Backend, DevOps, Data, Mobile, Security, ML Platform, Game Dev, and Product Engineering.
Where we are now
28k weekly readers, eleven people, six new roadmaps in draft. Hiring five more roles, all listed publicly.
Mentioned in
Walk a path. Or write the next one.
FREE · OPEN-SOURCE · NO ACCOUNT REQUIRED