System Design resources for developers

A free newsletter of short, focused posts on system design and problem solving, from the team behind the Grokking courses. Recent posts cover company interview processes (such as OpenAI and Anthropic roles), the most asked mobile system design questions and preparation plans, each linking to a fuller article on the blog. It suits engineers who want a steady, low-effort way to keep system design and interview topics fresh between deeper study sessions.

• System design
• DSA

The free, open companion to the Grokking the System Design Interview course, published as a GitHub repository. It teaches a pattern-first approach: learn building blocks such as caching, sharding, replication and queues well enough that any design question becomes a matter of combining them. It includes a seven-step interview framework, 30 patterns, 59 question walkthroughs, company guides, cheat sheets and study roadmaps, all readable in the browser without an account.

• System design
• Job search

A free, open source virtual whiteboard with a hand-drawn look that opens instantly in the browser with no account. You can sketch diagrams, share a live collaboration link, and export to PNG, SVG or JSON. It is widely used for system design interviews, architecture discussions and quick explanations. Practising your diagrams here before an interview means you spend the round thinking, not hunting for the arrow tool.

• System design

The original Grokking system design course, which made the design round learnable. It teaches a repeatable interview approach and the key trade-offs (SQL versus NoSQL, strong versus eventual consistency, REST versus RPC and more), then works through 15 classic designs such as a URL shortener, Instagram, Dropbox, Twitter, YouTube, a rate limiter, a web crawler, Uber and Ticketmaster, each with requirements, estimates and trade-off discussion.

• System design
• Job search
• Backend

A learning path that bundles five courses into one sequence for system design preparation: System Design Fundamentals, Grokking the System Design Interview, Advanced System Design Interview Volume II, Grokking Microservices Design Patterns and Grokking Design Patterns for Engineers and Managers. Together they add up to 76 chapters and 666 lessons. It suits engineers who want a complete, ordered curriculum instead of assembling one from scattered posts.

• System design
• Job search
• Career

A beginner-friendly, text-based course on the building blocks every system design is assembled from: scalability and availability, back-of-the-envelope estimation, networking and DNS, proxies, load balancers, API gateways, rate limiting, caching, CDNs, partitioning, replication, CAP and PACELC, SQL and NoSQL databases, indexes and distributed patterns such as quorum and heartbeats. Start here if full design walkthroughs feel like they assume knowledge you do not have.

• System design
• Backend
• CS fundamentals

The second volume of Grokking the System Design Interview, aimed at senior and staff (L5/L6) design rounds. It works through harder case studies such as a payment system, flash sale, notification service, unique ID generator, Gmail, Reddit, Google Calendar and a code judging system, then goes beneath them with patterns like quorum, write-ahead logs and vector clocks and deep dives into Dynamo, Cassandra, Kafka, Chubby, HDFS, GFS and BigTable.

• System design
• Backend
• Job search

A course on the recurring patterns behind scalable systems, more than 60 of them, taught through one continuous story of an online store growing from a single database to 100 million users. It covers communication, storage, caching, reliability, scaling, consistency, APIs and the edge, observability, batch and streaming, and a module on AI-era infrastructure such as LLM gateways, semantic caching, RAG pipelines and GPU serving. No distributed systems background is needed.

• System design
• Backend

A course on the judgment behind microservices in a system design round: when to choose them over a monolith, how to draw service boundaries, how services communicate, how to handle failure and keep data consistent, and how microservices run in production. It ends with full interview scenarios and a rapid-review question bank. Every lesson closes with a speakable 30-second answer and likely follow-ups. It suits engineers who need to discuss microservice trade-offs convincingly.

• System design
• Backend
• DevOps

A course on the named patterns that make microservice architectures workable: strangler fig, API gateway, backends for frontends, service discovery, circuit breaker, bulkhead, retry, sidecar, service mesh, database per service, saga, transactional outbox, event-driven architecture, CQRS, event sourcing and externalised configuration. Each pattern starts with the problem it solves and the cost it adds, with short Java examples. It suits developers and aspiring architects working with, or moving towards, service-based systems.

• System design
• Backend
• DevOps

An intermediate course on how systems scale in practice: caching, load balancing, API design, databases, sharding, messaging and streaming, consistency and replication, observability, security, networking, storage, reliability, and time and IDs. It is designed as the next step after Grokking the System Design Interview and System Design Fundamentals, focusing on the trade-offs between consistency, latency and availability that senior-level answers are judged on.

• System design
• Backend

A 14-day course built around a 14-step framework for the system design round, from scoping and requirements through estimation, API design, data modelling, caching, scaling, reliability and bottlenecks. Each day applies the framework to a group of real systems, more than 30 in all, including YouTube, WhatsApp, Uber, Stripe, ChatGPT, Google Search, a distributed rate limiter and a job scheduler. It suits engineers with a design round a few weeks away who need structure and breadth quickly.

• System design
• Job search

A free, browsable collection of system design lessons that opens with a roadmap for learning system design by career level. It covers the fundamentals (distributed system characteristics, networking, DNS, load balancing, API design, caching, partitioning, CAP, databases, indexes), trade-offs, how to approach a design interview, and walkthroughs of classic problems. It works as a reference while you practise and as a sample of the teaching style before choosing a course.

• System design
• Backend

An interactive practice tool for system design questions: you work through a real-world design step by step on a whiteboard and receive AI-powered feedback on your answer. Your practice sessions are saved with their status, so you can return to them and review results. It fills the gap most preparation leaves open, which is actually producing designs under realistic conditions rather than only reading worked answers.

• System design
• Job search

A text-based course on how databases work underneath: storage and page layout, indexing, transactions and ACID, concurrency control, partitioning and sharding, replication and consistency, consensus and leader election, recovery, and the main NoSQL families. It ends with case studies designing the databases behind Quora, TikTok, Airbnb and Snapchat. It suits engineers who want their database choices in system design answers to be defensible rather than hand-waved.

• System design
• Databases
• Backend
• Job search

The book that defined site reliability engineering, written by Google engineers and published by O'Reilly in 2016, and free to read online. It covers service level objectives and error budgets, eliminating toil, monitoring, release engineering, on-call, incident response, blameless postmortems, load balancing and cascading failures. It suits backend, DevOps and platform engineers who want to understand what running large production systems really involves.

• System design
• DevOps
• Cloud

A seven-stage learning path for engineers who can build a service and want to reason about systems at scale and under failure: core concepts and building blocks, data storage, partitioning and replication, networking, APIs and messaging, distributed systems fundamentals, resilience patterns, observability and safe releases, and complete designs worked from a blank page. By the end you can take a vague product requirement to a defensible architecture, estimate its load, and explain every trade-off in it.

• System design
• Backend
• Databases
• CS fundamentals

A ten-stage roadmap in Java, Python, TypeScript or C#: OOP used properly, SOLID with before and after code, clean code, all 23 classic design patterns, the UML you actually draw, refactoring behind tests, designing small systems such as a parking lot or rate limiter end to end, and code review. For students and early-career engineers whose code works and now needs to stay easy to read, test and change.

• System design
• Programming
• Web
• Testing

The companion to the Software design and clean code roadmap in Java, Python, TypeScript and C# editions: OOP used properly, SOLID, clean code, all 23 Gang of Four patterns, the UML you actually draw, refactoring and code smells, small designs end to end, and code review. Each of its 73 concepts is a line or two with a sketch in your language and the classic mistake to avoid.

• System design
• Programming
• Web
• Testing

Google's hands-on companion to the original SRE book: how to actually implement SLOs, alert on them, run on-call, respond to incidents and write blameless postmortems, with case studies from companies outside Google. Free to read online, and the most practical single book on running reliable services.

• System design
• DevOps
• Backend
• Cloud

Michael T. Nygard's classic on why systems fail in production and how to design them so they do not. It named the stability patterns every backend engineer now uses, circuit breakers, bulkheads and timeouts, and the antipatterns that cause cascading failures. The second edition adds cloud, containers and continuous deployment. Required reading before you carry a pager.

• System design
• Backend
• DevOps
• Cloud

Alex Hidalgo's practical guide to SLIs, SLOs and error budgets, written for teams that do not already have Google-scale tooling. It explains how to pick indicators users actually feel, set targets you can defend, and turn error budgets into decisions. The most complete book on the subject after the Google SRE books.

• System design
• DevOps
• Backend
• Cloud

The CNCF's vendor-neutral answer to "what is an internal platform, and why build one?", written by TAG App Delivery. It defines a platform, lists the attributes of good platforms and platform teams, and maps 13 capability areas to open source projects. Free, short, and the clearest shared definition to start a platform conversation with.

• System design
• DevOps
• Cloud

The Kimball Group's free, official summary of dimensional modelling: grain, facts, dimensions, star schemas, conformed dimensions and every type of slowly changing dimension. Short, precise definitions drawn from The Data Warehouse Toolkit, the book that most analytics data models still follow.

• System design
• Databases