The 16-Week Plan

This is a calendar. It maps the nine levels, the supporting tracks (deep dives, rust-vmm, contributor mindset, the issue roadmap), and the capstone onto 16 weeks of part-time work — the realistic rhythm of a working engineer giving Firecracker 8–12 focused hours a week. It is not a race. The gates in Milestones M1–M9 decide whether you advance, not the calendar; if a week takes you two, take two. But a schedule turns "I'll get to it" into "this week I do X," and that is the difference between finishing and drifting.

The plan front-loads the foundations (KVM, the threading model, the boot path) because everything later depends on them, and it interleaves real GitHub issue practice from Week 4 onward so you are contributing — not just reading — well before the capstone. Each phase ends with an exit checkpoint you must pass before moving on.

Note: Every "reading" cell points at curriculum pages and repo docs; every "labs" cell points at the level's labs. Run the labs — reading is not doing. Where a row says "issue practice," go to the Issue Roadmap, filter the real GitHub tracker (gh issue list), and actually engage. The roadmap stages are graded by difficulty; match them to your week.

Warning: Do not start the calendar on a broken baseline. You must have finished Overview & Prerequisites (a microVM boots from your own build) and read the Hitchhiker's Guide and Warm-Up before Week 1. Those are Week 0.

The Shape of the 16 Weeks

flowchart LR
    W0[Week 0: Setup + Warm-Up] --> P1[Weeks 1-3: Foundations<br/>L1-L2]
    P1 --> P2[Weeks 4-6: Architecture & KVM<br/>L3-L4]
    P2 --> P3[Weeks 7-9: Testing, Boot, Virtio<br/>L5-L7]
    P3 --> P4[Weeks 10-12: Real Contribution<br/>L8 + roadmap]
    P4 --> P5[Weeks 13-14: Advanced Maintainer<br/>L9]
    P5 --> P6[Weeks 15-16: Capstone<br/>full contribution cycle]

Phase 0 — Week 0: Setup & Warm-Up

Phase 1 — Foundations (Weeks 1–3): Levels 1–2

You build the floor everything stands on: a confident build/test loop, KVM from scratch (you write a tiny VMM by hand before you read Firecracker's), and your first real PR with DCO sign-off.

Tip: Weeks 1–2 are the highest-leverage in the whole plan. An engineer who genuinely understands the three KVM fd levels and the KVM_RUN loop reads the rest of Firecracker far faster. Do not rush Lab 1.4 — writing the ~70-line VMM yourself is worth ten pages of reading.

Phase 2 — Architecture & KVM (Weeks 4–6): Levels 3–4

Now you read Firecracker's own machinery: the three-thread model, the API→VMM action channel, and the vCPU run loop with its VM-exit taxonomy. This is where the warm-up's "under the hood" becomes code you can trace.

Phase 3 — Engine Internals (Weeks 7–9): Levels 5–7

Testing fluency, the boot path and guest memory, and the virtio device model — block, net, vsock — from the descriptor ring up. This phase has the most labs; pace yourself.

Tip: Week 9 is the densest. If you are behind, push Lab 7.3 (building a device) into Week 10 — but do not skip Lab 7.1. Tracing one real I/O end to end is the gate skill for the contribution phase.

Phase 4 — Real Contribution (Weeks 10–12): Level 8 + the Issue Roadmap

You stop practicing and start contributing for real: select a genuine issue, reproduce it, find the root cause through execution-path analysis, fix it, test it, and shepherd a PR through ≥2 maintainer reviews.

Warning: Real PRs take real calendar time — reviewers are busy and require ≥2 approvals. Open the PR early in Week 11 so the review clock starts. If it has not merged by Week 12, that is normal; the milestone is satisfied by a high-quality PR in active review, not necessarily merged.

Phase 5 — Advanced Maintainer (Weeks 13–14): Level 9

The maintainer-grade concerns: the security model end to end (jailer + seccomp + threat model), snapshot/restore compatibility, and diagnosing performance regressions.

Phase 6 — Capstone (Weeks 15–16): One Full Contribution Cycle

The capstone is not new material — it is the whole apprenticeship performed once, cleanly, on a real contribution, and written up as evidence. Follow the ten capstone steps.

After the capstone, keep going: the capstone projects portfolio and the feature masterclasses are where you deepen toward sustained, maintainer-track contribution. The path from contributor to maintainer is months to years — this 16 weeks earns you the starting line, not the finish.

If You Only Have 8 Weeks (Compressed Track)

For an experienced VMM/kernel engineer, or anyone who must move fast, here is a compressed track. It keeps the non-negotiables — KVM by hand, the run loop, one virtio I/O traced end to end, and one real PR — and trims the depth elsewhere. Budget the same 8–12 hours/week but accept that you will revisit the skipped deep dives later.

What the 8-week track deliberately defers (do these later): Level 5 testing depth, the rust-vmm labs beyond r1, the engineering at scale essays, the feature masterclasses, and the integration labs. You can become a credible contributor in 8 weeks; becoming a maintainer is the longer game the full 16 weeks (and beyond) builds toward.

Note: Whichever track you take, the milestones are the real gates. If you cannot pass Milestone M4's self-checks, you are not ready for Level 6 no matter what week the calendar says. The calendar serves the milestones, not the other way around.

Where to Go Next

Read Milestones M1–M9 next — they define the competence gates this calendar is pacing you toward. Then begin Level 1. Keep this plan and the milestones page open as you go; mark each exit checkpoint as you pass it.