HomeBlogs
← All series

System Design Mastery

A 34-part reading path from first-principles mindset to frontier-scale architecture — core building blocks, real decision trade-offs, full system designs, and advanced topics, in the order they actually build on each other.

01Mindset & Method

  1. Blog 1Why Every Developer Must Learn System Design
    4 min readPublished
  2. Blog 2The System Designer’s Mindset
    Coming Soon

02Core Building Blocks

  1. Blog 3Scalability Fundamentals — Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling
    Coming Soon
  2. Blog 4Load Balancing — Algorithms and Real-World Trade-offs
    Coming Soon
  3. Bonus AConsistent Hashing, Explained From First Principles
    Coming Soon
  4. Blog 5Caching Strategies — From Browser to CDN to Database
    Coming Soon
  5. Bonus BCache Invalidation — The Two Hard Problems
    Coming Soon
  6. Blog 6Database Fundamentals — SQL vs NoSQL, Choosing Correctly
    5 min readPublished
  7. Bonus FPACELC — Beyond CAP Theorem
    4 min readPublished
  8. Blog 7Message Queues and Event-Driven Architecture
    5 min readPublished
  9. Bonus CDatabase Indexing, Deep Dive
    Coming Soon
  10. Blog 8Database Sharding and Partitioning Strategies
    Coming Soon
  11. Blog 9Replication — Leader-Follower vs Multi-Leader vs Leaderless
    Coming Soon
  12. Bonus DIdempotency and Exactly-Once Delivery
    Coming Soon
  13. Blog 10API Design — REST, GraphQL, and gRPC Trade-offs
    4 min readPublished

03Architecture Decision Deep Dives

  1. Blog 11Rate Limiting — Algorithms and Where to Enforce Them
    4 min readPublished
  2. Blog 12Designing for Availability — Redundancy, Failover, and SLAs
    Coming Soon
  3. Bonus EThe CAP Theorem Interview Trap
    Coming Soon
  4. Blog 13Designing a URL Shortener
    Coming Soon
  5. Blog 14Designing a Rate-Limited API Gateway
    Coming Soon
  6. Blog 15Designing a Distributed Cache
    Coming Soon
  7. Bonus GBack-of-the-Envelope Estimation, Done Right
    Coming Soon
  8. Blog 16Designing a Notification System
    Coming Soon

04Full System Designs

  1. Blog 17Designing a News Feed / Timeline System
    Coming Soon
  2. Blog 18Designing a Chat Application
    Coming Soon
  3. Blog 19Designing a Ride-Sharing Dispatch System
    Coming Soon
  4. Bonus HDesigning for Idempotent Retries at Scale
    Coming Soon
  5. Blog 20Designing a Video Streaming Platform
    Coming Soon
  6. Blog 21Designing a Distributed Job Scheduler
    Coming Soon
  7. Bonus IMulti-Region Active-Active, the Hard Parts
    Coming Soon
  8. Blog 22Designing a Search Autocomplete System
    Coming Soon

05Advanced & Frontier

  1. Blog 23AI/LLM-Native System Design Patterns
    Coming Soon
  2. Bonus JObservability — Logs, Metrics, and Traces at Scale
    Coming Soon
  3. Blog 24The Frontier — Edge Computing, WASM, and What’s Next
    Coming Soon