Track map
Designing backend systems the way senior engineers and interviews expect: requirements and estimates, building blocks, distributed-systems theory, reliability, and case studies.
Track progress
0/13lessons complete
Unit 1
Approaching a design, requirements, latency numbers, back-of-the-envelope estimates, scaling, and availability math.
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Review key ideas →Test out of this unit →Unit 2
Loading a URL end to end, HTTP versions and semantics, REST, gRPC and GraphQL, real-time delivery, and load balancers.
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Cache layers, caching patterns, invalidation and TTLs, eviction, stampedes and hot keys, and Redis in practice.
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Unit 4
Choosing a database, replication and lag, partitioning and sharding, hot partitions, denormalisation, and storage engines.
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Unit 5
Why go async, queues vs logs, delivery semantics, partitions and ordering, retries and DLQs, jobs, and events.
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Unit 6
Consistency models, CAP and PACELC, quorums, time and ordering, consensus, and distributed transactions.
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Unit 7
Rate-limiting algorithms, distributed limits, idempotency keys, backoff with jitter, circuit breakers, and load shedding.
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Unit 8
Logs, metrics and traces, SLOs and error budgets, what to measure, alerting, incidents, and safe deployments.
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Unit 9
URL shortener, rate limiter, news feed, chat, notification system, and a design review checklist.
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