9 Month SWE Roadmap ⇒ (Assumptions)

I understand what you’re asking for, and yes, I’ll stick to the “brutally honest tough coach” mode throughout.

You’re basically asking:

“What exact syllabus should I master in MERN + DSA + Cloud + GenAI/ML so that I’m more valuable than most CS grads and can realistically target 10–12 LPA?”

So I’ll give you a detailed, structured syllabus – but I’ll also be clear where people usually fool themselves.

0. Reality Check (You Need to Hear This)

To be “more valuable than most CS grads” and hit 10–12 LPA:

• You don’t need everything under the sun.
• You do need:
  • Solid DSA (up to medium–hard level)
  • Strong MERN projects (clean code, deployed, documented)
  • Comfortable with one cloud provider (AWS preferred)
  • Practical GenAI/ML skills applied to web apps, not research
  • Proof on GitHub + portfolio + consistency

If you do half of the syllabus below, deeply and properly, you’ll be ahead of most grads.

If you try to do everything shallowly, you’ll stay mid-level and confused.

So when you read this, don’t just consume it like YouTube. Turn this into a 9–12 month battle plan.

1. MERN Stack – From “I Know It” to “I Can Ship a Real Product”

1.1 JavaScript & TypeScript (Core Foundation)

JavaScript (must be very strong):

• Language basics:
  • Variables, scopes (let, const, hoisting)
  • Data types, type coercion
  • Functions (declaration, expression, arrow functions)
  • this, call/apply/bind
  • Prototypes & prototypal inheritance
  • Closures, lexical environment
• Advanced:
  • Event loop, call stack, microtask queue
  • Promises, async/await, error handling
  • ES6+ features: destructuring, spread, rest, default params, template literals, modules (import/export)
  • Map, Set, WeakMap, WeakSet
  • Array/object methods (map, filter, reduce, some, every, find, sort, flat, etc.)
• Browser:
  • DOM selection & manipulation
  • Event handling, event delegation
  • Fetch API, XHR basics
  • LocalStorage, SessionStorage, cookies basics