Course catalog
Found: 13 courses · 15 in the catalog
An empty spot on a card says nothing: the “recommended” seal stands where moderation put it, the number of passes, where the exam has already been passed, and the subject area is there when it has been assigned.
Courses by Andrey Kuralekh · Show courses by all authors
English for Everyday Life in the UK (A1→A2)
recommendedVersion 1.0.0, 3 October 2026
level: beginner
English for Russian speakers who live in the UK and know a little English. The course takes you from A1 to a confident A2 through everyday British situations: neighbours and forms, renting a flat, the supermarket and café, buses and trains, the GP, pharmacy, 111 and 999, the council and bins, the bank, your child's school, work and a job interview. Every unit gives you ready-to-use phrases, one piece of grammar (to be, articles, Present Simple and Continuous, Past Simple, will and going to, Present Perfect, modal verbs) and politeness — why a correct Russian-style sentence can sound rude in English and how to fix it. Explanations are in Russian; examples and dialogues are in British English.
28 units · ~36.8 h without the optional units, ~42.8 h with them · material in Русский · author: Andrey Kuralekh
Version 1.0.0, 29 September 2026
level: advanced
A course for senior developers at Big 4 and other professional-services firms who already use GitHub Copilot — or are about to be told to — and want to use it as an engineer rather than as a faster autocomplete. Copilot in 2026 is an agent platform: agent mode and a Plan agent in Visual Studio 2026 and VS Code, specialised agents for debugging, profiling, testing and .NET modernisation, custom agents and skills your team keeps in the repository, MCP servers, cloud agents that return pull requests, and Copilot CLI in the terminal. The course teaches the skills that separate a senior from a passenger: engineering the context, splitting a task into a plan the agent can execute, reviewing an AI diff as critically as a colleague's, encoding team rules once so they work in every IDE, and knowing exactly what leaves the client's perimeter — and what it costs in AI Credits. Every capability is taught the same way: the pain that makes you reach for it, the capability itself, and its cost — including the uncomfortable ones, such as content exclusion not applying in agent mode, or a green test suite that an agent wrote to match its own bug. The mandatory track follows the official GH-300 (GitHub Copilot) exam outline, so the course doubles as certification preparation; optional units go deeper into Copilot CLI automation, hooks, model and cost engineering, and measuring real productivity. Labs use one sample repository — Aldervane Advisory LLP's ENGAGE platform — that opens in Visual Studio 2026, VS Code and the CLI alike; it is a public GitHub template (github.com/AndreyKuralekh/engage), so each learner starts from their own copy. Every lab also has a read-and-answer path for learners without a Copilot Business or Enterprise seat.
25 units · ~29.5 h without the optional units, ~34.5 h with them · material in English · author: Andrey Kuralekh
Version 1.0.0, 28 September 2026
level: beginner
A preparation course for Microsoft exam AI-901 (Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals), written for software engineers in Big 4 and other professional-services firms who already write SQL, C# and Python and now need a working grasp of AI on Azure — and the certificate that proves it. AI-901 replaced AI-900 in 2026 and changed its character: more than half of the exam is about building with Microsoft Foundry — deploying models, writing prompts, building agents, and calling text, speech, vision and Content Understanding capabilities from lightweight Python apps. The course follows the official skills outline (April 2026 revision) domain by domain, with the same weights: AI concepts and capabilities (40–45%) and implementing AI solutions with Foundry (55–60%). Every topic is taught the same way: the problem that makes you reach for the capability, the capability itself, and what it costs — in tokens, quotas, latency, data residency and risk. Hands-on labs walk through the Foundry portal and the Python SDK step by step; if your corporate subscription blocks Foundry, each lab has a read-the-code path so you can still practise every exam objective. The running case is Aldervane Advisory LLP, a fictional professional-services firm building an internal Service Desk agent, extracting data from invoices and timesheets, and transcribing client meetings — where confidentiality of client data is never optional. Practice uses the question formats of the real exam: single and multiple choice, matching, Yes/No statement sets and code completion. Visual sketchnotes summarise each concept on one colourful page. Optional units cover the same apps in C#, quotas and cost, evaluation and tracing, and client-data governance.
24 units · ~27.8 h without the optional units, ~33.8 h with them · material in English · author: Andrey Kuralekh · recipes: 1
Playwright Test Automation for QA Engineers
recommendedVersion 1.1.0, 28 September 2026
level: intermediate
A full working course on Playwright with TypeScript for QA engineers in large professional-services firms (Big 4 and similar). It covers the same ground as a comprehensive "zero to hero" Playwright curriculum: TypeScript essentials for test code, installation and project layout, running and debugging (CLI, UI mode, Inspector, codegen, Trace Viewer), locators and the strictness rule, web-first assertions, auto-waiting and the timeout hierarchy, every common UI component (inputs, checkboxes, radios, dropdowns, tooltips, dialogs, tables, date pickers, sliders, iframes), the Page Object Model and a scalable page architecture, custom fixtures, configuration and projects, environment variables and mobile emulation, authentication reuse through storageState, artifacts and reporters, visual regression testing, API requests, network interception and mocking, parallelism, retries, tags and flakiness control, Docker and CI on GitHub Actions. Every topic is taught the same way: the problem that exists without the feature, the feature that solves it, and the price you pay for using it. The course is written for people who will maintain a suite on a client engagement for years, not for people writing a demo test once — so review criteria, evidence for audit, secret handling and cost of maintenance are part of the material, not an appendix. By the end you should be able to build and maintain a Playwright suite unaided, and to pass an external certification-style exam on the same syllabus.
Testing and QA · 27 units · ~40.5 h without the optional units, ~42.2 h with them · material in English · author: Andrey Kuralekh
Version 1.1.0, 28 September 2026
level: intermediate
A hands-on course on using large language models across the test process: prompting for test analysis and design, evaluating what the model gives back, containing its risks, and rolling it out in an organisation that handles client data. Built around a professional-services engagement, where confidentiality and documented review are not optional. Assumes working knowledge of test design, test levels and defect management.
Testing and QA · 21 units · ~18.4 h · material in English · author: Andrey Kuralekh
Version 1.1.0, 27 September 2026
level: intermediate
A working course in T-SQL for QA engineers in professional services firms who already know the basics — SELECT, WHERE, a simple JOIN — and now need SQL as a daily testing instrument rather than as a topic. Everything is set in ENGAGE, the fictional engagement and billing platform of Aldervane Advisory LLP: clients, engagements, staff, timesheets, approvals, invoices, an audit log and a migration staging table. One schema, carried through every unit, so the examples are the ones you actually meet — a report total that disagrees with the raw rows, a record the UI claims it saved, a migration that quietly dropped a hundred time entries, a duplicate that only appears under a business key. Each construct is introduced the same way: the problem that makes you reach for it, the construct itself, and the price it charges. LEFT JOIN buys you the missing rows and charges you row multiplication. NOLOCK buys you speed on a shared environment and charges you dirty reads. A green test that never asked the right question costs more than a red one. Nineteen core units cover reading an unfamiliar schema, staying safe on a shared test environment, NULL and three-valued logic, data types and collation, dates and time zones, joins and orphan records, set operations as reconciliation, aggregation, subqueries, CTEs, window functions, test data setup and idempotent teardown, verifying what the application wrote, reading someone else's views and triggers, and turning a SQL check into a deterministic assertion. Five optional units add a local sandbox script, execution plans, client data and AI assistants, an end-to-end migration reconciliation checklist, and normalisation as an explanation of why the schema looks the way it does. Units are open in any order: come for the whole course, or come for the one thing that is biting you today. Scope note: the course teaches you to write queries and to read them. Practice covers both; the certification exam checks reading, recognition and knowledge of constructs, since a written query cannot be machine-verified here.
Testing and QA · 24 units · ~19.4 h without the optional units, ~24.1 h with them · material in English · author: Andrey Kuralekh
English Conditionals (Extended)
recommendedVersion 1.1.0, 27 September 2026
level: intermediate
An extended course on English conditionals for B1–C1, written for students and professionals in IT. It goes beyond the school four — zero / first / second / third — and builds on the Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman classification (factual, future-predictive and imaginative conditions), so you learn to choose a structure by meaning — fact, habit, implication, inference about the past, prediction, command, advice, hypothesis, the impossible — rather than plugging in «type two». Separate branches cover mixed conditionals, modals in the result clause, connectors other than if (unless, otherwise, provided that, as long as, only if, supposing, even if, whether or not) and the formal register with inversion (Should you need…, Had we known…). Every example and exercise comes from a developer’s working context: documentation and specifications, estimates, SLAs and contracts, code review, incident analysis, ADRs and RFCs, on-call and runbooks. The course ends with a practicum: a postmortem, a stakeholder email and a pull request comment, all written with conditionals.
Languages · 16 units · ~17.4 h without the optional units, ~18.1 h with them · material in Русский · author: Andrey Kuralekh
Version 1.1.0, 23 September 2026
level: intermediate
Business writing in English for software engineers in Big 4 consulting. The course is not about the format of a letter but about pragmatics: why a Russian-speaking professional is heard as blunter than they are, and how that is fixed. Its axis is room for refusal: an English business message leaves the reader a way to object, decline or explain, and that room is created by the text rather than assumed. Six classes of softening, a 22-item RU→EN interference register, the softening ceiling (where directness is mandatory), the grammar of blameless causation. Genres: client email, code review, chat and tracker, escalation, refusal and change request, status and RAG, incident communication. Every example comes from an engineer’s working day on a project. Entry level B1–B2, model answers are given at two levels.
Languages · 20 units · ~28.5 h without the optional units, ~29.5 h with them · material in Русский · author: Andrey Kuralekh · recipes: 1
English Phrasal Verbs (Extended)
recommendedVersion 1.1.0, 18 September 2026
level: advanced
An extended course of English phrasal verbs for B2–C1. The first half is built around the most frequent base verbs (do, make, get, take, give, come, put, run, set, keep, go, turn, bring, see, play, draw, call, hold, lay, bear, let, work, be), the second around particles (up, down, in, out, on, off, over, through, around/about, with, for, to, of, back, away, at, by, into, after, against, together, as). Separate units cover the syntax of phrasal verbs, the language of movement and road vocabulary, and antonym and synonym clusters. The course insists that a particle carries a stable meaning of its own: once you grasp the logic of up/down/out/off, you start inferring what unfamiliar combinations mean instead of memorising them as a list. The syllabus (scope and order of topics) follows Dave Nicholls, «Visual Phrasal Verbs» (2019); all explanations, examples and exercises were written anew for this course.
Languages · 18 units · ~51.5 h · material in Русский · author: Andrey Kuralekh · recipes: 1
Version 1.0.2, 14 September 2026
level: intermediate
Professional English for IT students at B1–B2 level. 28 units in two strands: Hard skills covers technical texts and terminology; Soft skills develops professional communication. English-language materials, Ukrainian explanations, vocabulary practice and explanatory diagrams. Estimated workload: 125 hours.
Languages · 28 units · ~125 h · material in Українська · author: Andrey Kuralekh
English: Phrasal Verbsdemo course
recommendedVersion 1.0.5, 19 August 2026
level: beginner
A basic set of English phrasal verbs: how they differ from a verb with a preposition, verbs about people and relationships, verbs about actions and plans.
Languages · 3 units · ~1.5 h · material in Русский · author: Andrey Kuralekh
Version 1.0.1, 4 October 2026
level: intermediate
A preparation course for Microsoft exam PL-300 (Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst), written for senior developers in Big 4 and other professional-services firms who already think in SQL and code — and keep getting surprised by DAX. The course follows the official skills outline (April 2026 revision) with its four domains and weights: prepare the data (25–30%), model the data (25–30%), visualize and analyze the data (25–30%), and manage and secure Power BI (15–20%). It covers what the 2026 updates added: Direct Lake, calculation groups, visual calculations, DAX query view and Copilot in Power BI. The spine of the course is the shift from SQL thinking to DAX thinking: filter context, row context, CALCULATE and context transition, taught with small models you can compute in your head before you check them in Power BI Desktop. Every topic follows the same order: the pain, the solution, and what it costs — memory, refresh time, query latency, licences or security risk. Labs run in Power BI Desktop (free) on a synthetic Aldervane Advisory LLP dataset — timesheets, invoices with three role-playing dates, month-end WIP balances and a nested JSON export — published on GitHub. Service features (workspaces, apps, RLS, refresh) are shown step by step, with a free route to a sandbox tenant and a read-the-screenshots path for learners whose corporate tenant blocks publishing. Practice uses the formats of the real exam: single and multiple choice, matching, Yes/No statement sets, "what does this measure return in this cell" and DAX completion. Isotype-style pictures summarise one idea each. Optional units cover PBIP/TMDL and Git, a SQL-to-DAX phrasebook, client-confidentiality patterns and the bridge to Microsoft Fabric.
28 units · ~51 h without the optional units, ~59 h with them · material in English · author: Andrey Kuralekh
Version 1.1.0, 27 September 2026
level: intermediate
A practical AI course for IT professionals at Big4 and other professional-services firms. Not data-science training: you learn to choose the right AI approach, measure quality, cost and risk, and design a PoC that can honestly say no. The whole course follows one running case. You work in the Digital & IT team of the fictional firm Aldervane Advisory LLP and run two pilots: a Triage PoC that suggests and partly automates routing of ENGAGE Service Desk tickets, and a Policy Assistant, a RAG assistant over internal IT policies that later gets limited agent actions. The data is synthetic but carries real-world defects: leakage in the ticket export, a superseded policy version in the index, a restricted client folder. Topics: framing AI use cases; optimization; probability, base rates and Bayesian updating; classical ML (regression, classification, similarity, triage); enterprise documents; evaluation (precision, recall, overfitting, shadow mode, monitoring); neural networks without magic; LLMs and adaptation options; RAG; AI agents, least privilege and prompt injection; Responsible AI and governance, including the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 as of September 2026; business cases and go / iterate / stop criteria; a capstone proposal. Every topic is taught as pain, solution and cost. About 190 practice items including calculations, diagrams and illustrations in every unit, and three optional Python labs with ready-made data generators: workload forecasting, ticket classification and a RAG prototype. Course language: Russian.
19 units · ~32.5 h without the optional units, ~39.5 h with them · material in Русский · author: Andrey Kuralekh