Your Learning Path

The Climb.

Every expert was once at base camp. Start here, follow the path, summit the systems that matter.

⚡ Interview this week? Skip to Foundation →

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Base Camp — Gear Up Master the vocabulary. You don't climb without your equipment.

Fundamentals Availability, reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, SLOs, concurrency, security Caching Write strategies, eviction, cache invalidation, Redis internals Storage & Databases ACID, indexing, CDC, connection pooling, read/write splitting Database Types Key-value, document, column-family, search engines, NewSQL Messaging Queues, delivery guarantees, SQS, RabbitMQ Event Broker Kafka internals — partitions, offsets, consumer groups Event-Driven Patterns Outbox pattern, CQRS, event sourcing, dual-write problem Data Processing Stream vs batch, Lambda architecture, schema evolution Distributed Systems Consensus, clocks, CRDTs, failure detection, sharding

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Trail Map — Estimation Know your numbers before designing anything at scale.

Back of Envelope Estimation Latency numbers, throughput, bandwidth, the estimation framework

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The Climb — Case Studies Apply everything. Each level is harder than the last.

Foundation Level 1 Unique ID Generator, URL Shortener — first principles of scale Ascent Level 2 Notification System, Pastebin — async pipelines and reliability Expedition Level 3 Rate Limiter — infrastructure design, failure modes at scale Summit Level 4 KV Store, Netflix — under-the-hood internals at real scale Battleground Level 5 WhatsApp — 2B users, real-time delivery, ordering guarantees, no clean answers

🏁 You made it to the top.