Ellis Yardell

Hi! I'm Ellis. I write backend systems and I teach the way I wish somebody had taught me — one runnable example at a time. For six years I ran the engineering apprenticeship at Zephrin Labs and watched 400 career switchers ship their first production service. Most of them still email me.

Before that I led the platform group at Yarrowfield Robotics, where the on-call rotation taught me more about distributed systems than any textbook did. 91% of the cohort I mentored there moved into paid engineering roles within four months. I also spent two years at Zunda Analytics rebuilding their event pipeline, which is where most of my war stories come from.

These days I put that classroom experience into video. In 2021 I published my Distributed Systems Field Guide, which has since become the course I get the most email about, and last spring it was voted Yalora's Course of the Year. I'm rewriting the whole thing for the 2026 edition, chapter by chapter, in public.