0.1% Engineer Roadmap v2

25–30 focused hours per week. Wednesday and Friday now include dedicated community time.

Community time allocation: Spend 3–5 hrs/week on community activities — SO answers, blog writing, Twitter threads, Discord engagement, code reviews. This isn't extra work; it's how you process and solidify what you learned during study hours. The best way to verify you understand something is to explain it to someone else.

Your public presence should grow alongside your skills. These are checkpoints for community engagement and visibility.

The compound effect of community: Month 1 feels pointless — you're tweeting to 10 followers and answering questions nobody reads. By month 12, your blog posts get organic traffic. By month 24, people recognize your name in niche communities. By month 36, opportunities come to YOU — job offers, speaking invitations, collaboration requests. Every month of consistent presence compounds. The people who quit community engagement at month 3 never see the returns that arrive at month 18.

Key rule: Never be the person who only self-promotes. For every post about YOUR work, engage with 5 other people's work. Comment on their PRs. Share their blog posts. Answer their questions. The network builds around generosity, not broadcasting.

Technical checkpoints — what your project portfolio should look like at each stage.

GitHub profile by month 36 should show: 30+ repositories, consistent commit history, contributions to 2–3 recognized projects, at least 1 project with 50+ stars, and a README that tells your story from PHP developer to systems + AI engineer.

Blog by month 36: 15+ deep technical posts. The titles alone should tell your story: "Building a text editor in C," "How storage engines actually work," "Inside PyTorch's autograd at the C++ level," "Writing fast CUDA kernels."

Stack Overflow by month 36: 150+ answers across C, Rust, systems, PyTorch, CUDA. This alone puts you in the top 5% of SO contributors in these tags.