🧩 System Design
Reason out loud about real tradeoffs — scaling, storage, queues, and consistency — so the whiteboard interview feels like a conversation, not a quiz.
0/5
1Free2🔒3🔒4🔒★🔒 Standard🎓🔒 Professional
Scaling: out, not just up
Grow from one box to thousands: stateless servers, L4 vs L7 load balancing, and knowing exactly when to shard versus replicate.
Storage & caching that holds up
Pick SQL or NoSQL by access pattern, price your indexes, choose write-through or write-back, and tame the hardest problem: cache invalidation.
Messaging: decoupling without losing your mind
Absorb spikes and survive outages with queues — handle backpressure, see through the 'exactly-once' myth, and make consumers idempotent.
Consistency tradeoffs & API design
Navigate CAP and PACELC to choose strong or eventual consistency, then ship resilient APIs with idempotency keys, cursor pagination, and rate limits.
Chapter review
Course review — design it end-to-end
Lab: Design a system in a mock interview · 10-question check
Final exam
System Design — comprehensive capstone
Hands-on capstone + course-wide exam · scored to a role level