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Computer Science
System design, deep
Beyond interview prep — how real systems at real scale are actually shaped.
8 lessons
~150 min total
First principles
What you'll learn
Reason about real production systems end-to-end
Make load, consistency, and availability tradeoffs with honest math
Understand why specific designs dominate specific problem shapes
Progress
0 / 8
Track complete ✓
Lessons
1
Latency, throughput, and back-of-envelope
The numbers every engineer should know by heart.
3 objectives
2
Load balancers and fronting
L4 vs L7, sticky sessions, and the jobs a load balancer really does.
3 objectives
3
Sharding and replication
Two different problems that everyone confuses — here's the line.
3 objectives
4
Consistency models, honestly
Strong, eventual, causal — and when each is the right promise.
3 objectives
5
Queues and the log
Kafka-style logs ate the world for good architectural reasons.
3 objectives
6
Hot, warm, cold storage
Where bytes live over time — and why tiering is a business decision.
3 objectives
7
Case: ride-sharing dispatch
A real-time matching problem with location, latency, and race conditions.
3 objectives
8
Case: a real-time chat system
Fan-out, presence, and ordering at scale.
3 objectives
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