Week 01 — Workstation

Phase 0 · Ways of working: what a product engineer is

1. Concept brief

You’re building the machine you’ll use for the next 25 weeks. The goal is a setup that is reproducible: if your laptop died tonight, one script would rebuild it.

Vocabulary

• Shell vs terminal: the terminal (Ghostty, iTerm2) is the window; the shell (zsh) is the program inside it that interprets your commands.
• PATH: the ordered list of folders the shell searches for programs. Most “command not found” errors are PATH problems.
• Package manager: installs and updates software. Homebrew for Mac apps and CLIs, uv for Python, npm/pnpm for JavaScript.
• Version manager: mise lets each project pin its own Node/Python version, which avoids “works on my machine” problems.
• Dotfiles: config files whose names start with . (.zshrc, .gitconfig). Engineers keep these in a git repo.
• Container: a packaged, isolated environment (Docker). OrbStack is a fast Docker runtime for Mac.
• Idempotent: running it twice has the same effect as running it once.

2. Guided lab (~3 hrs)

Type every command yourself. Before running each one, say out loud what you expect it to do.

# 1. Xcode command-line tools (compilers, git)
xcode-select --install

# 2. Homebrew
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew --version

# 3. Core CLI tools
brew install git gh mise uv jq ripgrep fzf tmux tree bat eza
brew install --cask ghostty orbstack visual-studio-code

# 4. Git identity
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
git config --global init.defaultBranch main
gh auth login

# 5. Language runtimes via mise
mise use --global node@lts python@3.12
mise ls

# 6. Check Docker works
docker run --rm hello-world

# 7. Claude Code
npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code
claude --version

Then:

1. Add eval "$(mise activate zsh)" to ~/.zshrc, then run source ~/.zshrc. Why is that line needed?
2. Run echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n' and identify where each tool lives.
3. Run which python node git. Are they the versions you expect?

3. Unguided challenge (~3 hrs)

Create a GitHub repo called dotfiles containing:

• Brewfile, generated with brew bundle dump
• your .zshrc and .gitconfig
• bootstrap.sh, which on a fresh Mac installs Homebrew if it’s missing, runs brew bundle, symlinks the dotfiles into ~ and sets up mise runtimes

Acceptance criteria

• Running ./bootstrap.sh twice causes no errors and no duplicate entries.
• The script starts with set -euo pipefail.
• The README explains what it does and how to run it.

Then create a second repo, product-engineer-lab. This is your course spine for the next 25 weeks.

4. Ways of working (~1 hr)

What a product engineer is. Write half a page:

• How does a product engineer differ from a PM, a full-stack engineer and a forward-deployed engineer?
• Which of your past roles came closest, and why?
• Name one product decision you’d have made differently if you could have prototyped it yourself in a day.

5. Check

1. What’s the difference between a terminal and a shell?
2. You get command not found right after installing a tool. What’s the likely cause, and how do you check?
3. Why use mise rather than installing Node with Homebrew?
4. What does “idempotent” mean, and why does it matter for a setup script?
5. What does set -euo pipefail do?

6. Teach-back

Write teach-back/week-01.md (200–300 words): “What I set up and why, for a PM who’s never opened a terminal.”

Done when

• All lab commands run cleanly
• dotfiles repo is pushed and the bootstrap script is idempotent
• product-engineer-lab repo exists
• Ways-of-working reflection written
• Check answered
• Teach-back committed