Part 0 of 11

Prerequisites

Networking, OS, data structures, databases, APIs. The foundation.

Modules
5
Hours
2
Difficulty
Beginner
  1. 0.0beginner

    Networking Fundamentals for System Design

    A practical tour of OSI layers, TCP/UDP, HTTP/1.1 through HTTP/3, DNS, TLS 1.3, and realtime transports like WebSockets and SSE.

    25 min gRPCWebSocketsCloudflare
  2. 0.1beginner

    Operating System Essentials for System Design

    Processes, threads, memory hierarchy with real latency numbers, I/O models (epoll, kqueue, io_uring), and file system internals you need to design systems.

    20 min RedisNginxKafka
  3. 0.2beginner

    Data Structures for Distributed Systems

    The handful of data structures that power modern infrastructure: hash tables, B-trees, LSM-trees, Bloom filters, skip lists, and consistent hashing rings.

    25 min RedisCassandraScyllaDB+4
  4. 0.3beginner

    Database Fundamentals for System Design

    SQL, ACID, indexing, query execution, and the normalization vs denormalization debate, covered at the depth you need to design real systems.

    25 min PostgreSQLMySQLRedis+1
  5. 0.4beginner

    API Design Basics: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and the Hard Parts

    Resource modeling, GraphQL's N+1 problem, gRPC streaming, versioning strategies, idempotency keys, and cursor pagination done right.

    25 min gRPCGraphQLWebSockets+1