Expert & Real-World Systems
Study how the world's largest systems are actually built. Apply everything you've learned to design complete systems from scratch, the way you would in an interview or on the job.
Designing Instagram: A Deep Dive into Photo Sharing at Scale
Analyze how to design a photo-sharing platform like Instagram. Cover storage, CDN, feed ranking, and how to scale to billions of photos.
Designing Netflix: Video Streaming, CDN, and Recommendations at Scale
Analyze how to design a video streaming service like Netflix. Cover video encoding, CDN architecture, recommendation systems, and handling millions of concurrent viewers.
Designing a URL Shortener: Base62 Encoding, Redirects, and Analytics at Scale
Design a URL shortener like Bitly or TinyURL. Cover base62 encoding, distributed ID generation, redirect latency, custom aliases, and async click analytics.
Designing Twitter: Fan-Out Strategies, the Celebrity Problem, and the Home Timeline
Design a Twitter-like social feed. Cover fan-out-on-write vs fan-out-on-read, the celebrity/hot-user problem, follower graph storage, and notification delivery at scale.
Designing YouTube: Video Upload, Transcoding, and Streaming at Scale
Analyze how to design a video-sharing platform like YouTube. Cover resumable uploads, async transcoding pipelines, adaptive bitrate streaming, CDN delivery, and approximate view counters.
Designing Uber: Real-Time Location, Dispatch, and Ride Matching
Analyze how to design a ride-hailing platform like Uber. Cover geospatial indexing, real-time location tracking, the dispatch/matching service, surge pricing, and the trip state machine.
Designing WhatsApp: Real-Time Messaging, Presence, and End-to-End Encryption
Analyze how to design a chat system like WhatsApp. Cover persistent WebSocket connections, offline message delivery, last-seen status, group fan-out, and the Signal Protocol.
Designing a Distributed Search Engine: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking Billions of Pages
Analyze how to design a web-scale search engine like Google. Cover distributed crawling, inverted indexes, index sharding, query processing pipelines, and multi-layer caching.
Trade-off Analysis and Decision Frameworks in System Design
Learn to evaluate architectural trade-offs like consistency vs availability, latency vs throughput, and complexity vs flexibility. Use decision matrices and ADRs to make and communicate design decisions.