Coming soon
ARCHITECTURE 02Rate limiter
Protect a service with counters, windows and distributed state.
Planned curriculumWorkspaceHome
A VISUAL SYSTEM DESIGN LEARNING PLATFORM
Learn system design by
watching systems behave.
Follow real request paths, understand every building block, and change the conditions that make an architecture succeed or fail.
Plain-English foundations Interactive diagrams Interview practice
CHOOSE YOUR WAY IN
One platform. Three ways to learn.
Start with the route that matches your goal. Every path meets inside the same architecture.
01
START FROM ZEROLearn the foundations
Understand requests, storage, caching and scaling through visual explanations.
Explore building blocks02
PREPARE WITH PURPOSEPractice interviews
Turn an open-ended problem into requirements, estimates and defensible decisions.
Try the interview prompt03
CHANGE ONE VARIABLERun experiments
Increase traffic, remove capacity and watch bottlenecks appear in the architecture.
Open the playground FEATURED FIRST ARCHITECTURE
Small links.
Big system.
Begin with a complete URL shortener. Follow one request from the client to Redis and PostgreSQL, then test what happens under traffic and failure.
Four request journeys Eight controlled experiments Interview challenge
Open architecture URL SHORTENER · LIVE REQUEST PATH5 connected components
Requests are moving through the systemLEARN · INSPECT · EXPERIMENT
ARCHITECTURE LIBRARY
Learn one system at a time.
Each case study will combine a lecture, request-flow diagram, interview problem and live experiments.
Available
ARCHITECTURE 01URL shortener
Follow reads and writes through a cache-aside architecture, then stress every dependency.
Open architectureComing soon
ARCHITECTURE 03Notification system
Deliver work asynchronously with queues, workers, retries and idempotency.
Planned curriculumComing soon
ARCHITECTURE 04Chat system
Explore persistent connections, presence, ordering and message delivery.
Planned curriculumComing soon
ARCHITECTURE 05Video platform
Move large media through upload, transcoding, object storage and a CDN.
Planned curriculumComing soon
ARCHITECTURE 06Ride sharing
Combine live location, geospatial search, matching and event streams.
Planned curriculumBUILDING BLOCK ENCYCLOPEDIA
Understand the parts before combining them.
A CURRICULUM, NOT A COLLECTION OF DIAGRAMS
Build understanding in the right order.
Start with the language of distributed systems. Learn the reusable parts, trace real workflows, and only then reason about scale and failure.
Begin with the foundations- 01Foundations
- 02Building blocks
- 03Request & data flows
- 04Scaling & bottlenecks
- 05Failures & resilience
- 06Complete systems
See it. Predict it. Change it. Explain it.
The fastest way to build intuition is to make a decision and watch its consequences.