Roadmap

The building blocks every system sits on: DNS, CDN, load balancers, app layers, microservices.

How machines talk to each other: HTTP, TCP/UDP, REST, gRPC, and the trade-offs between them.

How data is stored, queried, replicated, and partitioned. The heart of almost every system.

How systems handle more traffic, more data, and more users without falling over.

The single most impactful performance optimization in most systems — and the source of most consistency bugs.

Decoupling producers from consumers so the system survives bursts, failures, and slow downstream deps.

The hard problems: consistency, consensus, clocks, partitions, and the myths about exactly-once.

Patterns that keep systems working when things fail — because things always fail.

Knowing what your system is doing, what it did, and why it broke.

Reusable architectural patterns for evolving, decomposing, and protecting systems.

Cloud-specific patterns: valet keys, materialized views, index tables, event sourcing, queue-based load leveling.

Authentication, authorization, and the patterns that keep systems safe.

Push-based communication: WebSockets, SSE, WebRTC, and the trade-offs between them.

The meta-skills: capacity estimation, API design, bottleneck identification, and how to think out loud.

End-to-end system designs. Where everything you learned comes together.