Grokking the Modern System Design Interview
Educative's system design course, built around a set of reusable building blocks that get assembled into each design, all inside an interactive browser environment with no setup. A widely used alternative worth comparing before you commit.
Course
System Design
Educative
6 to 8 weeks
Intermediate
Subscription, from about $17/mo billed annually
What it is
A text based interactive course that teaches a library of building blocks first, such as rate limiters, key value stores, blob storage, distributed queues and monitoring, then designs a series of well known systems by composing them.
The building block approach
Teaching the components as reusable units before the designs is a genuine improvement on the older format, because it makes explicit what every design has in common. By the fourth walkthrough you are recognising pieces rather than learning new material.
Format
Everything runs in the browser as text with diagrams and quizzes rather than video, which suits readers and is considerably faster to revise from than a video course.
Best for: people who prefer reading to watching, and anyone wanting a second perspective alongside another course.
Ready to start?
Opens on Educative in a new tab.
Stuck on something specific?
Writing only gets you so far. If you want an answer to your situation rather than the general case, book a session and we will work through it together. Every session is free; a few slots open each week.
Follow along
New writing, resources and project ideas land here first.