What Else for the Sudonomicon?

I started work last year on an introduction to systems programming for data scientists. I assumed learners were comfortable with the material covered in the Carpentries workshops on the Unix shell and Python:

• Unix shell:
  • pwd; ls; cd; . and ..; rm and rmdir; mkdir; touch; mv; cp; tree; cat; wc; head; tail; less; cut; echo; history; find; grep; zip; man
  • Current working directory; absolute and relative paths; naming files
  • Standard input; standard output; standard error; redirection; pipes
  • * and ? wildcards; shell variable with $ expansion; for loop
• Python for command-line scripting
  • Variables; numbers and strings; lists; dictionaries; for and while loops; if/else; with; defining and calling functions; sys.argv, sys.stdin, and sys.stdout; simple regular expressions.
  • Create a virtual environment; activate it and install packages.

The topics I outlined then were:

• filesystems (e.g., what’s a symbolic link?)
• processes and job control
• the basics of the HTTP protocol
• accounts, permissions, and SSH
• shell variables
• virtual environments (in the Python .venv sense)
• the basics of networking (IP addresses, DNS lookup)
• virtualization with Docker

Before I start fleshing out the existing material, I’d like to figure out what else ought to be included. Possibilities include:

• creating and managing certificates (which is still a lot harder than it should be)
• concurrency and parallelism (threads versus processes, how to do this in Python)
• observability and logging
• resource management with tools like top, ulimit, and nice
• serialization and binary file formats
• web APIs and REST
• compression, archives, and hashes
• more SSH and remote access (e.g., port forwarding and tunnels)
• firewalls and NAT
• profiling (and why benchmarking is hard)
• web security vulnerabilities (e.g., SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and cross-site request forgery)

I would be very grateful for guidance: what do you think a (data) scientist who’s starting to manage their own system needs to know?