intermediate96 lessons · 15 chapters
System Design: Beyond the Prompt
As agentic coding tools take over more and more of the actual typing, the engineer's job is shifting — less time hand-writing implementation, more time deciding what the system should look like in the first place: the trade-offs, the failure modes, the architecture an AI assistant can't choose for you. This is a complete, from-scratch path through that discipline — 15 chapters and 65 lessons from first principles through databases, caching, consensus, microservices, and security, each chapter closing with a scored quiz and a set of interview questions with model answers.
system-designarchitecturedistributed-systemsscalabilityinterview-prep
prerequisites
- →Comfort building basic applications (any language, any stack)
- →No prior system design or distributed systems experience required
- →Curiosity about why production systems are built the way they are
you'll learn
- ✓Reason about requirements, back-of-envelope estimation, and trade-offs like an architect, not just a coder
- ✓Choose and scale the right data layer — SQL vs NoSQL, indexing, replication, and sharding
- ✓Design caching, load balancing, and rate limiting for systems under real traffic
- ✓Apply the CAP theorem, consistency models, and consensus (Raft) to distributed data correctly
- ✓Decompose a monolith into microservices with proper service boundaries and communication patterns
- ✓Design for observability, reliability, and security — monitoring, SLOs, auth, and common attack vectors
- ✓Work through three full end-to-end designs — a URL shortener, a chat system, and a news feed — and present them clearly
course structure
Phase 1 — Thinking in Systems6Phase 2 — How the Internet Works6Phase 3 — Web Architecture Patterns6Phase 4 — Databases & Storage8Phase 5 — Caching6Phase 6 — Load Balancing & Reverse Proxies6Phase 7 — Scalability Patterns6Phase 8 — Asynchronous Processing6Phase 9 — Consistency & Distributed Consensus7Phase 10 — Microservices & Service Architecture7Phase 11 — API Design6Phase 12 — Observability & Reliability7Phase 13 — Security Architecture6Phase 14 — Data Pipelines & Stream Processing6Phase 15 — Putting It All Together7