System Design Academy
A working path through distributed systems, low-level design, and modern AI infrastructure — mentored by an AI that knows what you've covered.
Last time you were digging into Indexes, B-trees, ACID. Want to keep going, or pivot?
Ask me anything — trade-offs, capacity math, "where do I start?" — or tell me what you're trying to learn.
How packets traverse the layers, the TLS handshake, and how HTTP/3 eliminates head-of-line blocking.
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11 of 11 phasesNetworking, OS & Database Foundations
What you must know before designing any distributed system.
How packets traverse the layers, the TLS handshake, and how HTTP/3 eliminates head-of-line blocking.
Recursive lookups, TTL, record types, and how GeoDNS routes users worldwide.
Context switching, mutexes vs semaphores, the Coffman conditions for deadlock.
Clustered vs non-clustered indexes, isolation levels, why B+trees for disk.
Core Architecture Patterns
REST, caching, load balancing, and CDNs.
Reverse-engineering real architectures at scale.
Idempotency keys, pagination, rate limiting headers.
Cache-Aside, Write-Through, eviction, stampedes, penetration, avalanches.
Routing algorithms, L4 vs L7, health checks.
Distributed Data
Replication, sharding, CAP, message queues.
Resilience & Observability
Consensus, circuit breakers, SLOs.
Microservices
Gateways, service discovery, service mesh.
Cloud Infrastructure
AWS, containers, Kubernetes, autoscaling.
Performance & Capacity
Latency, throughput, capacity math.
Enterprise Patterns
CQRS, event sourcing, saga, outbox.
AI & Real-Time Systems
Vector DBs, RAG, CRDTs.
Storage Internals
LSM trees, Bloom filters, gossip.
End-to-End Designs
YouTube, Netflix, Uber, Stripe, Slack, Twitter.
Transcoding pipelines, HLS/DASH, CDN distribution.
Geospatial indexing, messaging, double-entry ledgers.
Base62, caching, 301 vs 302, analytics.
WebSocket gateways, presence, fan-out, Snowflake IDs.
Priority queues, channel workers, rate limits, idempotency.
BFS frontier, Bloom dedup, robots.txt politeness.
Trie with Top-K, prefix caching, batch rebuild.
Master/chunk servers, chunk replication, heartbeat.