Code Reference: The Project Catalog

The prose in this book teaches the why and the shape of each idea. The code — complete, runnable, tested — lives in a companion catalog of 52 from-scratch systems, linked throughout the chapters with the “Build it →” pattern. This appendix is the index to that catalog.

Each project implements one or more of the concepts a chapter develops, at production scale rather than illustration scale. Where a chapter says “Build it →”, it points here; where a project needs background, its README points back into these chapters. The full bidirectional map of which chapter ↔︎ which project lives in CONCEPT_TO_PROJECT_MAP.md.

All projects are under 06-real-world-projects/ in the repository. Python projects use FastAPI + pytest; Rust projects use trait-based design with Result-based error handling and Criterion benchmarks; the one Go system uses gRPC + protobuf.


Foundation & Backend (1–10)

Job queues, caching, microservices, data platforms, and ML training orchestration — the systems most chapters in Parts I, II, and IV build on.

Distributed Systems (11–20)

Consensus, networking, compilers, query engines, and SIMD analytics — the systems-programming tier, most heavily exercised by Part II’s Rust and C++ field guides.

ML / AI Core (21–37)

Embeddings, attention, RAG, model serving, parameter servers, and ML compilers. Part IV draws on the ML-systems members of this tier; the LLM/RAG members are the province of the companion AI Engineering book.

Advanced ML (38–49)

Distributed training, GPU memory and scheduling, inference engines, GNNs, and quantization — the heavy machinery behind Part IV’s Deep Learning, Distributed Training, and GPU chapters.

Data Infrastructure (50–52)

The feature platform, message queue, and time-series database that anchor Part II’s Data Engineering chapters.


Note

The catalog is broader than this book: several projects (notably the RAG, attention, and on-device-LLM systems, 21–27 and 41–47) implement concepts taught in the companion AI Engineering book rather than here. They are listed for completeness — this book links the ones whose concepts it teaches.