Pragmatic System Design Learning

The back story for the initiative started during @David Aponte‘s preparation for technical interviews. He found materials to help him sharpen his general system design skills but many of the examples he learned from felt like toy scenarios that didn’t match the sort of challenges he was dealing with on the job.

It was either that or they didn’t always walk through the process of how they arrived at their design and why. Seeking materials to help him further develop the ability to design systems and clearly communicate the why behind them, he found the best content coming from companies that were solving similar problems. He found them to be hard to distill and sometimes hard to understand as they often presupposed a lot of knowledge in distributed systems, software engineering, databases, networking, and more.

To help fill in the gaps and make technical content easier to consume for himself and other engineers, we started the system design reviews. It’s a series of content (blogs, podcasts, animations) dedicated to reviewing industry system designs for solving challenging engineering problems at scale. The reviews are about all the things David is interested in learning more about, getting better at, and helping others understand more clearly.

The series is meant to be useful to budding or experienced engineers, technical managers, or anyone that is interested in improving their ability to design systems for the job and technical interviews.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3vkEKxWd-uviYPQc1F0_t8q1Dz7J80eV