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Next Steps

The course is over, but you're at the start of the path, not the end. Here is the map.

Solidify what you learned​

  • Docker's official docs - genuinely good; re-do the get-started track from memory
  • Play with Docker - free in-browser Docker playground
  • Containerize something you already built - a school project, a bot, anything. The second Dockerfile you write teaches more than the first ten you copy.
  • Redo the final project solo, from an empty folder, without looking at the old one. Painful and extremely effective.

Go deeper on containers​

  • Multi-stage builds & image slimming - get your image under 100 MB, then under 50
  • Healthchecks and graceful shutdown - what happens to in-flight requests when a container stops?
  • Docker networking internals - what is a bridge? Follow a packet from your browser to a container
  • Security - run as non-root, scan images (docker scout), read about container escapes
  • How containers actually work - namespaces and cgroups; try building a container from scratch in ~100 lines of code

The DevOps road​

The skills around containers that make a career:

  • Git, properly - branching, rebasing, pull-request workflows (you have the basics from the mini-workshops)
  • CI/CD - GitHub Actions: build → test → push image → deploy, automatically on every push
  • A real deployment - rent the cheapest VPS you can find, deploy your project with Compose + Caddy + HTTPS, keep it alive for a month. You will learn more from this than from any tutorial.
  • Monitoring - Grafana + Prometheus; you can't fix what you can't see
  • Infrastructure as Code - Terraform / OpenTofu, Ansible
  • Kubernetes - when you're ready, follow the ladder in the Kubernetes chapter
  • The DevOps roadmap - the whole landscape on one (intimidating, don't panic) page

Stay in touch​

Questions after camp? The IPW community doesn't close when the camp does - ask in the camp Discord/group, or write to the instructors directly. We like getting "look what I deployed" messages. 🚀