Hashflag Software Engineering Playbooks

The Vets Who Code field manual — a documentation site that takes veterans from their first command in the terminal to shipping production AI.

Live site: https://vets-who-code.github.io/

Built with MkDocs. This site is the source of truth for how we train and how we build on Vets Who Code projects.

The playbooks

Four playbooks, meant to be worked in order:

1. Foundations — terminal, VS Code, Git & GitHub, HTML & CSS, JavaScript, Python, advanced Python, the SDLC, and code challenges.
2. Next.js — advanced TypeScript, the App Router, testing, deployment, media & analytics, and full-stack AI features.
3. FastAPI — FastAPI services, Google Gemini, prompt engineering, RAG, agents, LLMOps, and production deployment.
4. AI Engineering — the conceptual climb: building agents that terminate, ground, and prove themselves, from the first model call to spec-driven mastery.

The original SOPs and reference curriculum (command line, Bash, Git, Python, patterns, FastAPI, Streamlit) live alongside them.

Working on the site locally

The site is MkDocs with the readthedocs theme. Everything it needs ships with MkDocs itself — the theme, search, and the Markdown extensions — so there are no extra plugins to install.

# One-time setup (a virtualenv is recommended)
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install mkdocs

# Preview with live reload at http://127.0.0.1:8000
mkdocs serve

# Build the static site into ./site — --strict fails on broken links or nav
mkdocs build --strict

Project layout

docs/                 Markdown content, one file per page
  css/custom.css      Vets Who Code brand design system
  assets/             Images, the social preview card, PDFs
overrides/main.html   Theme override — Open Graph / social card metadata
mkdocs.yml            Site config: navigation, theme, Markdown extensions

Content lives in docs/. Navigation, the site title, and build options are in mkdocs.yml. The entire look is one stylesheet, docs/css/custom.css.

Deploying

The live site is published to the gh-pages branch by MkDocs:

mkdocs gh-deploy

This builds the site and force-pushes it to gh-pages, which GitHub Pages serves at https://vets-who-code.github.io/. Deploy from main once your change is merged — merging a pull request updates the source but does not publish the site on its own.

Contributing

Branch off main, make your change, and open a pull request.

• Keep the field-manual voice: plain-spoken, practical, built for people who ship real software.
• Run mkdocs build --strict before opening a PR — it fails on broken links and missing nav entries.
• New pages go in docs/ and get an entry in the nav: block of mkdocs.yml.

Together, we maintain excellence in our code and our conduct. 🇺🇸