System Design Roadmap
Architect scalable, resilient, high-throughput systems
Your Journey at a Glance
💡 How to use this roadmap
Work through each phase in order. Click on a skill to expand it — you'll find a description and curated resources. Don't rush; understanding beats speed. Complete one phase before moving to the next.
Foundations
Build the mental models you need before designing systems. Understand how computers communicate, how data moves across networks, and the basic building blocks of distributed software.
Core Building Blocks
Master the individual components that every large system is built from. Each of these primitives appears in almost every system design interview and real-world architecture.
Distributed Systems
Now things get interesting. Learn how to build systems that span multiple machines, handle failures gracefully, and stay consistent when the network betrays you.
Core Algorithms & Data Structures
The algorithms that power every distributed system you use. These are the hidden engines behind databases, caches, search, and consensus. Understand them deeply and you'll never design a system blindly again.
Architecture Patterns
Learn the blueprints that experienced architects use to organize complex systems. Each pattern solves specific organizational and technical challenges.
Gen AI & LLM Systems
The architecture patterns behind AI-powered systems. Not about training models — about designing production systems that integrate, scale, and govern LLMs safely and cost-effectively.
Scalability & Performance
Design systems that handle millions of users without buckling. Learn how to measure, identify bottlenecks, and scale every layer of the stack.
Security & Reliability
A system is only as good as its weakest link. Learn to design for security, compliance, disaster recovery, and operational excellence.
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.
Roadmap Complete!
You now have the foundations of a production-ready Java engineer. Apply by building real projects.
Design & Architect a Real-Time Collaborative Document Editor
Design a Google Docs-like collaborative editor supporting real-time multi-user editing, version history, comments, sharing/permissions, and offline sync. Produce a complete architecture document with component diagrams, data models, API contracts, and operational runbooks.
What you'll build
- Real-time collaborative editing using CRDTs (Yjs/Operational Transformation) with WebSocket connections
- Document versioning with snapshot + delta history, point-in-time recovery, and branching
- Fine-grained access control: owner, editor, commenter, viewer roles with shareable links
- Full-text search across documents with ranking, filtering, and fuzzy matching
- Offline support: local edits queued and merged on reconnect with conflict resolution
- Multi-region deployment with active-active writes and conflict resolution strategy
- Observability: distributed tracing across all services, RED dashboards, and alerting on SLO breaches
- Security: E2E encryption option, audit logging, GDPR-compliant data deletion pipeline
Tech stack
Key highlights
- ✦Demonstrates mastery of distributed data structures (CRDTs), real-time protocols, and conflict resolution
- ✦Covers all phases: networking, databases, distributed systems, architecture patterns, scalability, and security
- ✦Production-ready: includes observability, disaster recovery, compliance, and multi-region design