Learn it. Compute it. Defend it.
Four formats: fundamentals with quizzes, interactive system-design breakdowns of real systems, auto-graded back-of-envelope drills nobody else offers, and mock interviews with an AI interviewer that probes your design like a real one.
Fundamentals· 16 lessons
- 01How to Approach a System Design Interview (the 45-Minute Framework)12m
- 02What Happens When You Type a URL: The Request Lifecycle12m
- 03APIs 101: REST, RPC, Idempotency & Pagination13m
- 04Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation13m
- 05Databases 101: Indexes, Transactions & ACID13m
- 06Availability & Reliability: SLAs, Redundancy & Failure Domains13m
- 07Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling (and when each wins)11m
- 08Load Balancing: L4 vs L7, algorithms, health checks12m
- 09Caching: cache-aside, write-through, write-back, eviction, stampedes13m
- 10SQL vs NoSQL: what actually drives the choice13m
- 11Replication & Sharding: leader/follower, failover, shard keys, resharding pain13m
- 12CAP and Consistency Models: linearizable → eventual, read-your-writes, quorums13m
- 13Message Queues & Streams: decoupling, at-least-once vs exactly-once, ordering, DLQs13m
- 14CDNs & Edge: what to push to the edge, invalidation, signed URLs12m
- 15Consistent Hashing: why mod-N fails, the ring, virtual nodes12m
- 16Distributed ID Generation: UUID vs auto-increment vs Snowflake, sortability tradeoffs12m
System Design· 11 interactive breakdowns
Real systems, broken into a standard 45-minute interview: requirements, estimation, architecture with data-flow diagrams, deep dives, and a self-check quiz in every tab.
- Design TicketmasterHard
Sell 50,000 seats to 500,000 fans in 60 seconds — without ever double-selling one.
Booking & concurrency - Design ZomatoHard
Find the open restaurants around a hungry user in 200 ms, then dispatch the best rider from thousands of moving dots — before the food goes cold.
Geo search & delivery dispatch - Design UberHard
Hand a rider the nearest free car in seconds — while millions of drivers rewrite the map with a GPS ping every few seconds.
Real-time matching & geo - Design YouTubeHard
Ingest 500 hours of video every minute, transcode each upload into a full quality ladder, and stream it to a billion viewers from a CDN edge near each one.
Video upload, transcode & CDN - Design NetflixHard
Stream 4K video to tens of millions of viewers at once — filling the internet's pipes without a buffering spinner.
Streaming & CDN at scale - Design Google DriveMedium
Store, sync, and share files across every device — chunk once, deduplicate globally, and never lose an edit.
File sync, storage & sharing - Design WhatsAppMedium
Push a message to any of two billion phones the instant it's sent — even the ones that are offline.
Realtime messaging & presence - Design Twitter (News Feed)Hard
Turn one tweet into millions of home timelines — without melting on the celebrity who has 100M followers.
News feed fan-out - Design Google MapsHard
Route across a continent in milliseconds and predict arrival to the minute — while the traffic underneath never stops changing.
Geospatial routing & ETA - Design a Payment SystemHard
Move billions of dollars a day — and never lose, invent, or double-charge a single cent.
Payments, ledger & idempotency - Design a Notification SystemMedium
Fan one event out to millions across push, SMS, and email — reliably, and without ever spamming a user.
Multi-channel fan-out
Estimation drills· 15
Back-of-envelope math with a verdict: QPS, storage, bandwidth, cache sizing.
- Twitter Write QPS & Tweet StorageEasy
- Google Search QPS & ConcurrencyEasy
- Email Service Storage GrowthEasy
- Instagram Photo StorageEasy
- WhatsApp Messages & ConnectionsEasy
- LinkedIn Connection-Request ThroughputMedium
- Uber Driver Location IngestMedium
- TikTok Video Storage & EgressMedium
- Amazon Product Search QPSMedium
- Netflix Concurrency & EgressMedium
- Slack Message Storage & QPSMedium
- Zoom Meeting BandwidthHard
- E-commerce Order PipelineHard
- Notification Fan-out VolumeHard
- Cache Sizing with the 80/20 RuleMedium
AI interviewer· 16 case studies
A staged mock interview: you design in free text, the AI grades each stage against a rubric and probes back.
- Design a URL ShortenerEasy
Build a scalable service that converts long URLs into short, memorable links.
- Design a Distributed Rate LimiterMedium
Build a distributed rate limiter that enforces per-user API quotas across multiple servers.
- Design a 1:1 Chat App (WhatsApp-scale)Medium
Build a real-time messaging system supporting one-to-one conversations at WhatsApp scale.
- Design a News FeedHard
Build a scalable news feed system that ranks and delivers personalized content in real-time.
- Design a Notification SystemMedium
Build a system that delivers notifications (email, SMS, push) at scale with reliable retry and deduplication.
- Design Ticketmaster (AI mock)Hard
A flash-sale ticketing system: sell scarce seats to a huge concurrent crowd without ever double-booking.
- Zomato — Mock InterviewHard
A food-delivery marketplace: geo-search nearby restaurants, then dispatch and live-track the best rider across a moving city.
- Uber — Mock InterviewHard
A real-time ride-hailing marketplace: match riders to the nearest available driver over a constantly-changing geospatial index, without double-dispatch.
- YouTube — Mock InterviewHard
A UGC video platform: ingest and transcode uploads at scale, then stream them worldwide from the CDN edge with adaptive bitrate.
- Netflix — Mock InterviewHard
A planet-scale video-on-demand service: stream a curated, pre-encoded catalog to tens of millions of concurrent viewers from the edge.
- Google Drive — Mock InterviewMedium
A file storage, sync, and sharing service: store files as deduplicated chunks and keep every device in sync without re-uploading gigabytes.
- WhatsApp — Mock InterviewMedium
A real-time messaging system: push 1:1 and group messages to hundreds of millions of persistent connections, and deliver reliably even when the recipient is offline.
- Twitter News Feed — Mock InterviewHard
A read-heavy social feed: fan one tweet out to millions of home timelines without collapsing on celebrity accounts.
- Google Maps — Mock InterviewHard
Continental-scale routing with live-traffic ETA, map tiles, and geocoding — precompute a graph whose weights never sit still.
- Payment System — Mock InterviewHard
A Stripe-like payment system: move money through external card networks and banks with exactly-once semantics and a strongly consistent double-entry ledger.
- Notification System — Mock InterviewMedium
A multi-channel notification pipeline: fan one event out to push, SMS, and email at scale, deliver it reliably, and never spam the user.