A LITTLE STRUCTURE FOR YOUR CURIOSITY
Find your way.
Build your intuition.
A suggested route through all 30 designs. Start small, connect the ideas,
then take on the systems where the tradeoffs get interesting.
0 of 30 designs completedProgress is saved only on this device. Mark a design complete in its article.
01
Start with the fundamentals
Build intuition for requests, state, and scaling.
02
Connect people and content
Explore real-time delivery, fanout, and media pipelines.
Chat System
Messaging & real-timeNotification System
Messaging & real-timeReal-Time Collaboration
Messaging & real-timePhoto Sharing
Content & mediaNews Feed
Content & mediaVideo Streaming
Content & mediaFile Sync
Social & collaborationSocial Graph
Social & collaboration03
Find, rank, and recommend
Move from a simple prefix lookup to learned relevance.
04
Build reliable infrastructure
Reason about durable data, coordination, and operations.
05
Make correctness count
Protect inventory, money, and assignments under concurrency.
06
Design the next generation
Bring your foundations to modern platforms and AI workloads.