Focused, hands-on problems for sharpening your DevOps and server-side skills. Some teach specific concepts while others mirror real-world scenarios. Every challenge includes hints, feedback, and automated solution checks.
Challenges crafted by iximiuz Labs to help you master DevOps and Server Side topics.
Make a single echo server listen on either a TCP socket or a Unix domain socket, selected by its command-line argument. The challenge illustrates that the same stream-socket workflow works with two address families (AF_INET and AF_UNIX).
Write a TCP client to hold a back-and-forth conversation with a "chat" server: send a line, read the reply, send another line - repeat until the session is over. A hands-on lesson in designing an application protocol on top of a byte-oriented TCP stream.
Write your first TCP client for a push-only telemetry server that starts sending sensor readings as soon as you connect. Likely the easiest way to get started with TCP socket programming.
The Hello World of network programming: implement a tiny TCP echo server in the language of your choice.
Practice optimizing applications' container images using multi-stage builds. Rewrite single-stage Dockerfiles for a Go backend and a TypeScript frontend to produce smaller, production-ready images without unnecessary build tools and dev dependencies.
Practice building and compiling applications inside their Dockerfiles by containerizing a Go backend and a TypeScript frontend.
Learn how to keep your container images lean by excluding development dependencies (linters, test frameworks, etc.) from the production build.
Practice installing OS-level packages during a Docker image build to satisfy system library requirements of your application.
Learn the absolute basics of Dockerfile authoring by containerizing a simplistic Node.js server application with just three instructions: FROM, COPY, and CMD.
Learn how to write a Dockerfile from scratch and build a working container image for a web server application with a simple set of dependencies.
