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System Design

System Design Advanced

Consistent hashing, distributed caching, Kafka-style event streams, Raft consensus, sagas, rate limiting and full case studies — Twitter, WhatsApp, Uber, YouTube. The depth senior engineers are expected to have.

Advanced
8 weeks
8 modules · 38 lessons
STACKSHADE / COURSE
System Design

System Design Advanced

LEARNER OUTCOMES

What you should be able to do

  • Reason about consistency, consensus and partitions like a distributed systems engineer
  • Design event-driven architectures with exactly the right delivery guarantees
  • Whiteboard large-scale systems end-to-end under interview pressure
  • Evaluate real architecture trade-offs with numbers, not vibes
TOPIC FORMAT

Every topic has two modes

Read — deep article with diagrams, artifacts and retrieval.

Present — focused deck with notes, pointer, timer and fullscreen.

Review — spaced review queue with due dates and recall ratings.

Focus — Pomodoro sessions, daily goals and a persistent scratchpad.

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Read → predict → inspect → retrieve. Your progress stays on this device.

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STUDY LOOP

Designed around learning, not scrolling

Each topic now has the full loop: article, visual explanation, artifact, retrieval and a recordable presentation.

Retrieval

Recall before revealing. The attempt is part of the learning action.

Spacing

Return at increasing intervals instead of rereading everything immediately.

Generation

Predict the next state or answer before seeing the worked version.

Dual coding

Pair compact prose with diagrams, traces, tables and motion.

Feynman

Teach the idea back in plain language to expose missing links.

Interleaving

Contrast nearby problem types so recognition becomes more useful.

CURRICULUM

Pick a topic

Sharding & the modulo-N trap (visual deep dive)
Read12 min
ReadDeck
Consistent hashing ring simulator
Interactive15 min
ReadDeck
Virtual nodes and balanced load
Video12 min
ReadDeck
Dynamo-style partitioning in the wild (Cassandra, Memcached)
Video14 min
ReadDeck
Compute key movement when a 5th node joins (by hand)
Practice20 min
ReadDeck
FEYNMAN PROMPT

Teach the 360° ring to a junior: nodes and keys on a clock, walk clockwise to assign.

ACTIVE RECALL
Why do virtual nodes fix imbalance on the ring?

Each physical node owns many small, randomly-placed vnodes; law of large numbers evens out ownership, and a joining node steals small slices from everyone.

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