System Design Masterclass

System design is the skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else. It’s not about memorizing architectures — it’s about understanding tradeoffs, knowing which patterns solve which problems, and being able to reason through a design from first principles.

This masterclass covers everything: the foundational patterns that every large-scale system uses, and the classic design problems that come up in interviews and real production systems.

What This Course Covers

Fifteen lessons split into three parts:

Part 1: Foundational Patterns (Lessons 1–8)

1. How to Approach Any System Design Problem — The framework for breaking down any design question systematically
2. Scaling Reads — Caching layers, read replicas, CDNs, and cache invalidation strategies
3. Scaling Writes — Sharding, write-ahead logs, LSM trees, and partitioning strategies
4. Designing for High Availability — Redundancy, failover, health checks, and the CAP theorem in practice
5. Load Balancing Patterns — Algorithms, L4 vs L7, health checks, and global load balancing
6. Database Selection — SQL vs NoSQL vs NewSQL — when to use what and why
7. Message Queues & Event-Driven Architecture — Kafka, RabbitMQ, pub/sub, event sourcing, and CQRS
8. Rate Limiting & Throttling — Token bucket, sliding window, distributed rate limiting at scale

Part 2: Advanced Patterns (Lessons 9–10)

9. Distributed Transactions & SAGA Pattern — Two-phase commit, sagas, compensation, and eventual consistency
10. Real-Time Systems — WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, long polling, and when to use each

Part 3: Classic Design Problems (Lessons 11–15)

11. Designing a URL Shortener — The classic warm-up problem, done properly
12. Designing a News Feed — Fan-out, ranking, real-time updates (Facebook/Twitter)
13. Designing a Notification System — Multi-channel delivery, deduplication, priority queues
14. Designing a File Storage System — Chunking, dedup, sync, conflict resolution (Dropbox)
15. System Design Interview Checklist — The complete playbook for acing design interviews

Who Is This For?

• Software engineers preparing for system design interviews
• Backend developers who want to understand large-scale architecture
• Tech leads making infrastructure and architecture decisions
• Anyone building systems that need to handle real traffic

Prerequisites

• Comfortable with at least one backend language (Python, Java, Go, Node.js)
• Basic understanding of databases, APIs, and networking
• Familiarity with concepts like latency, throughput, and availability