Topics
10 domains, 57 topics — distilled from curated books. Pick a domain to start.
System Design Foundations
The vocabulary and back-of-envelope reasoning every design decision downstream depends on: scale, tradeoffs, and what "available" and "consistent" actually mean.
5 topicsNetworking & Traffic Management
How a request finds its way from a client to the right server, and how traffic gets spread across a fleet of them.
5 topicsCaching
The single highest-leverage technique for making a slow system feel fast — and the invalidation problems that come with it.
5 topicsDatabases at Scale
What happens to a database once it has to survive replication, partitioning, and concurrent writes at scale.
6 topicsMessaging & Stream Processing
Decoupling producers from consumers with queues, topics, and logs — and the delivery-guarantee tradeoffs that come with each.
6 topicsDistributed Systems Theory
The theory that makes multi-machine systems provably correct (or explains exactly how they fail): consensus, ordering, and coordination.
6 topicsReliability & Resilience
Designing for failure instead of hoping it won't happen: containment, backoff, and graceful degradation under load.
6 topicsScalability & Architecture Patterns
The structural decisions — statelessness, service boundaries, multi-region — that determine whether a system can actually scale out.
6 topicsObservability & Operations
Knowing what your system is doing in production, and what to do when it stops doing it correctly.
5 topicsSystem Design Case Studies
Worked, end-to-end designs that put every other domain here to use on a single, concrete product.
7 topics