← System Design
Exercises
Design Challenges
30 open-ended system design exercises — interview-style, no hand-holding
0
Completed
30
Total
5
Capstones
Week 1
Scalability & Core Infrastructure
Day 1
Load Balancer Design
Design L7 load balancing for 500K RPS with consistent hashing and health checks
Architecture
Day 2
Caching Strategy
Design multi-tier cache for social media reads; handle invalidation and stampede
Architecture
Day 3
CDN Architecture
Design CDN for video streaming with edge workers and cache-control strategy
Architecture
Day 4
Connection Pool Sizing
Size PgBouncer pools for a 100-service microservice architecture
Deep Dive
Day 5
Distributed Rate Limiter
Implement sliding window rate limiting across 50 API servers using Redis
Implementation
Day 6
Service Mesh Design
Design service discovery and circuit breaking for 200-service mesh
Architecture
Day 7 ★
URL Shortener Capstone
Full design: sharding, redirect latency, analytics, abuse prevention, multi-region
Capstone
Week 2
Data Systems & Messaging
Day 8
Storage Engine Choice
Choose between B-tree and LSM for three different workloads with justification
Trade-offs
Day 9
Replication Strategy
Design sync vs async replication for a financial ledger service
Architecture
Day 10
Sharding Design
Shard a 10TB user database; handle cross-shard queries and rebalancing
Architecture
Day 11
NoSQL Data Modeling
Model a social graph in DynamoDB for efficient friend lookups and feed queries
Deep Dive
Day 12
Kafka Pipeline Design
Design exactly-once payment processing with Kafka and idempotent consumers
Implementation
Day 13
Event Sourcing Design
Redesign an order service using CQRS + event sourcing with schema evolution
Architecture
Day 14 ★
Ride-Sharing Capstone
Full design: geospatial matching, surge pricing, real-time driver locations
Capstone
Week 3
Distributed Systems Theory
Day 15
CAP Trade-off Analysis
Map 10 real systems to their CAP position; justify with concrete failure scenarios
Analysis
Day 16
Raft Implementation Design
Design leader election and log replication for a 5-node Raft cluster
Deep Dive
Day 17
Saga vs 2PC
Compare saga and 2PC for e-commerce checkout; design compensating transactions
Trade-offs
Day 18
Clock Synchronization
Design ordering for distributed events using Lamport and vector clocks
Deep Dive
Day 19
Fault Tolerance Design
Design failure detection and recovery for a 100-node distributed system
Architecture
Day 20
Observability Stack
Design end-to-end observability for a 50-service microservice platform
Architecture
Day 21 ★
KV Store Capstone
Full design: consistent hashing, gossip, quorum, anti-entropy, hinted handoff
Capstone
Week 4
Real-World Case Studies
Day 22
YouTube Design
Design video transcoding pipeline and adaptive bitrate streaming at YouTube scale
Case Study
Day 23
Twitter Feed Design
Solve the celebrity problem: design hybrid fan-out for 500M daily users
Case Study
Day 24
Search Crawler Design
Design distributed web crawler and inverted index for 10B pages
Case Study
Day 25
WhatsApp Messaging
Design end-to-end encrypted messaging with offline delivery at 2B users
Case Study
Day 26
Stripe Payments
Design ledger, idempotency, webhook delivery, and PCI-compliant architecture
Case Study
Day 27
Airbnb Booking
Design inventory locking and distributed calendar without overbooking
Case Study
Day 28 ★
Slack Capstone
Full design: WebSocket channels, message search, notification fan-out, workspace isolation
Capstone
Week 5
Advanced Patterns & Final Capstone
Day 29
Advanced Patterns
Design CRDT-based shopping cart and zero-downtime migration plan
Advanced
Day 30 ★
Data Platform Final
Design a complete cloud-native data platform — architecture, cost model, failure playbook
Final Capstone