System Design Masterclass
A comprehensive system design course for software engineers — from fundamental scaling patterns to real-world design problems. Covers caching, sharding, load balancing, message queues, distributed transactions, and classic interview problems with architecture diagrams and working examples.
System design is the skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else. It’s not about memorizing architectures — it’s about understanding tradeoffs, knowing which patterns solve which problems, and being able to reason through a design from first principles.
This masterclass covers everything: the foundational patterns that every large-scale system uses, and the classic design problems that come up in interviews and real production systems.
What This Course Covers
Fifteen lessons split into three parts:
Part 1: Foundational Patterns (Lessons 1–8)
- How to Approach Any System Design Problem — The framework for breaking down any design question systematically
- Scaling Reads — Caching layers, read replicas, CDNs, and cache invalidation strategies
- Scaling Writes — Sharding, write-ahead logs, LSM trees, and partitioning strategies
- Designing for High Availability — Redundancy, failover, health checks, and the CAP theorem in practice
- Load Balancing Patterns — Algorithms, L4 vs L7, health checks, and global load balancing
- Database Selection — SQL vs NoSQL vs NewSQL — when to use what and why
- Message Queues & Event-Driven Architecture — Kafka, RabbitMQ, pub/sub, event sourcing, and CQRS
- Rate Limiting & Throttling — Token bucket, sliding window, distributed rate limiting at scale
Part 2: Advanced Patterns (Lessons 9–10)
- Distributed Transactions & SAGA Pattern — Two-phase commit, sagas, compensation, and eventual consistency
- Real-Time Systems — WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, long polling, and when to use each
Part 3: Classic Design Problems (Lessons 11–15)
- Designing a URL Shortener — The classic warm-up problem, done properly
- Designing a News Feed — Fan-out, ranking, real-time updates (Facebook/Twitter)
- Designing a Notification System — Multi-channel delivery, deduplication, priority queues
- Designing a File Storage System — Chunking, dedup, sync, conflict resolution (Dropbox)
- System Design Interview Checklist — The complete playbook for acing design interviews
Who Is This For?
- Software engineers preparing for system design interviews
- Backend developers who want to understand large-scale architecture
- Tech leads making infrastructure and architecture decisions
- Anyone building systems that need to handle real traffic
Prerequisites
- Comfortable with at least one backend language (Python, Java, Go, Node.js)
- Basic understanding of databases, APIs, and networking
- Familiarity with concepts like latency, throughput, and availability