Real Projects, Real Experience
Students at laptopchange don't just watch tutorials. They build working containerized systems, troubleshoot actual virtualization challenges, and solve problems that mirror what you'd face in a production environment. These projects represent hundreds of hours spent learning through doing.
Core Skills Framework
Container Architecture
Students design multi-container applications with proper networking, volume management, and orchestration patterns. Real deployments, not toy examples.
Virtual Infrastructure
Building hypervisor environments from scratch, managing resource allocation, and understanding the hardware layer beneath cloud abstractions.
Security Hardening
Implementing proper isolation, network policies, and access controls. Students learn security isn't an afterthought but a fundamental design principle.
Performance Optimization
Measuring resource usage, identifying bottlenecks, and making intelligent trade-offs. The kind of work that separates competent engineers from exceptional ones.
Projects That Actually Matter
- Microservices deployment with automated failover and health monitoring
- Hybrid cloud infrastructure connecting on-premise VMs with container clusters
- CI/CD pipelines that handle real code repositories and deployment strategies
- Multi-tenant environments with proper resource isolation and monitoring
- Disaster recovery systems tested through actual failure scenarios
The Way We Teach
You won't find step-by-step instructions here. Students get requirements, constraints, and access to mentors who ask better questions than they give answers. Because that's how actual engineering work happens.
Some students spend weeks on a single project. That's fine. We'd rather have someone understand distributed systems deeply than rush through a checklist of technologies.
One student spent three weeks debugging networking issues in a Kubernetes cluster before discovering the problem was a single misconfigured DNS entry. That's not wasted time. That's the kind of persistence that builds genuine expertise.
Learning Path Structure
Foundation Phase
Three months working with virtual machines, understanding hardware abstraction, and building comfort with command-line environments. Students set up their own hypervisors and manage resource allocation manually.
No one moves forward until they can explain what's actually happening when you type 'docker run' or spin up a new VM instance.
Container Immersion
Four months deep in containerization. Building images from scratch, managing registries, understanding networking models, and orchestrating multiple services. Students work with both Docker and alternative runtimes.
By the end, they can design a containerized application from first principles and explain the trade-offs of different approaches.
Production Systems
Five months building systems that could actually run in production. Monitoring, logging, security hardening, performance tuning, and disaster recovery. Students maintain systems they've built and respond to real incidents.
This is where theory meets reality. Some projects fail spectacularly. That's valuable learning too.
Recent Student Work
Distributed Logging System
Valerie Dunsworth built a complete logging infrastructure handling 50,000 events per second across a containerized microservices environment. The system includes automatic log rotation, retention policies, and a custom query interface.
What impressed us most was her decision to implement backpressure handling when log volumes spiked unexpectedly during load testing.
VM Orchestration Platform
Cormac Steinbach created a management layer for virtual machine clusters with automated provisioning, resource balancing, and migration capabilities. The system handles both KVM and VirtualBox hypervisors.
Security Audit System
Thorsten Lundeberg developed automated security scanning for container images and running containers. The system checks for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance violations, then generates detailed remediation reports.
Start Your Journey in Fall 2025
Our next cohort begins September 2025. Applications open in June. We accept 24 students per session because that's the number we can actually support well.