This is a good series. Very few tutorial mention the dev environment setup.

It would be great if this can be complemented with a list of projects along with the unit/integration test cases (only description) that the end-system should pass along with a cloud deployment specification. There could be advanced section that encourages discovering edge cases.

When one wants to practice they can slowly climb the ladder to understand how to implement a system and gain expertise. I always find myself lacking in ideas on how to practice what I know. Practising the same set of data structures and algorithms is not very motivating.

My thoughts exactly. The keynote given by Cook felt dull and overdone. He tried hard but he had big shoes to fill.