The course

Seven tracks, from how a request crosses the network to how an agent spends its budget. Every lesson ends in something to do.

Tracks

FoundationsHow a request crosses the network, the trade-offs every design makes, and how to estimate and structure an interview answer.About 3 hours
Building BlocksThe parts most systems are built from: DNS, load balancers, APIs, caches, databases, queues, and the stores behind search and maps.About 6 hours
HLDKeeping distributed data consistent and services coordinated, then whole designs: notifications, Instagram, Twitter and Uber.About 3 hours
LLDThe code inside a service: classes and SOLID, layers, APIs and data models, errors, concurrency and tests, ending with a parking lot.About 5 hours
Design PatternsThe classic creational, structural and behavioural patterns, then concurrency, architectural and distributed ones, and when not to use one.About 14 hours
Reliability & SecurityKeeping a system up and safe: resilience, observability, SLOs, disaster recovery, threat modelling, authentication and incident response.About 3 hours
AI SystemsBuilding with models: inference, retrieval and RAG, agents and their tools, fine-tuning, evaluation and guardrails, and running it all.About 10 hours