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syllabus

The System Design course

Every topic is a short course of its own: a few bite-size tutorials with a diagram and a worked example, then a quick-review page with key points and an FAQ. Read front to back, or jump to the topic your next interview will ask about.

12 sections61 topics228 tutorials~10 hours
prefer rapid review?

The cheatsheet carries the same 61 topics as one-liners and trade-offs, with no tutorials in between.

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01

Fundamentals

The request path, the guarantees a database makes, and the vocabulary every other course assumes.

6 chapters24 lessons
02

Numbers to Know

The figures you estimate with. Latency, storage, and what an availability target actually costs.

4 chapters12 lessons
03

Scaling

What to do when one machine stops being enough, and what breaks the moment there are two.

4 chapters16 lessons
04

Databases

Choosing a store, indexing it, and splitting it once one server cannot hold the data.

5 chapters19 lessons
05

Caching

Why a database slows down under load, and how a copy in memory fixes it without lying to your users.

8 chapters33 lessons
06

Communication

How services talk: request and response, queues, and events nobody is waiting for.

4 chapters14 lessons
07

Real-Time

Pushing data to a client on a protocol built to do the opposite.

4 chapters13 lessons
08

Security

Proving who someone is, keeping the connection private, and the mistakes that undo both.

4 chapters16 lessons
09

Architecture

How to cut a system into services, and when not to cut it at all.

5 chapters18 lessons
10

Reliability

Designing for the day something fails, because something will.

5 chapters17 lessons
11

Observability

Knowing what your system is doing before a customer tells you.

4 chapters16 lessons
12

Common Designs

The questions that actually get asked, worked end to end.

8 chapters30 lessons