System Design
Practice the designs that show up in real interviews and real outages.
25+
completed
~67h
total time
7
projects
URL Shortener
The classic first system design project — a small service that hides a surprising number of real distributed-systems decisions.
Rate Limiter
A shared infrastructure component that protects every other service you build after it.
Distributed Key-Value Store
Build a simplified Dynamo-style store to understand consistent hashing, replication, and quorum reads/writes.
Real-Time Chat Application
Move from request/response to persistent connections, and confront the delivery and ordering guarantees that come with it.
News Feed / Fanout System
The system behind every social media timeline — and the project where fan-out-on-write vs fan-out-on-read really matters.
Distributed Task Scheduler
The infrastructure layer behind cron-as-a-service, delayed jobs, and reliable retries at scale.
Video Streaming Platform
The capstone project — combines storage at scale, asynchronous transcoding, and global content delivery.