The exploration of nanochat, an educational language model, emphasizes understanding the complexities of language model development and maintaining clarity in the process. Unlike state-of-the-art models, nanochat serves as an educational tool within a single repository, showcasing how these systems are built, focusing on the workflow rather than just the model itself. The project integrates with Dagster for managing data ingestion, tokenization, training, and validation, emphasizing modularity and observability. By using a curated subset of the FineWeb dataset and employing a Rust-based tokenizer for efficiency, the pipeline demonstrates the importance of organized data management and reproducible workflows. Validation is elevated to a prominent role, ensuring data usability before proceeding to modeling stages. This series aims to enhance the training process's visibility and reproducibility, with future installments focusing on modeling workflow and practical training considerations.