System Design 101: What I'm Building, Reading, and Practicing

1/ Why System Design?

I realized that while DSA builds problem-solving skills, System Design teaches how real-world software works:

• Scalability
• Reliability
• Performance
• All crucial for building real products and cracking top-tier interviews.

2/ Resources I'm Following 📚

Here are the goldmines I’m learning from:

1. karanpratapsingh/system-design
2. 🔗 System Design Primer
3. 🔗 ByteByteGo Course
4. 🔗 This Reddit roadmap
5. https://newsletter.systemdesign.one/

3/ What I'm Building ⚙️

To learn by doing, I’m designing 5 real systems from scratch:

1. URL Shortener (TinyURL)
2. Messaging App (WhatsApp)
3. Feed System (Instagram/Reddit)
4. File Storage (Google Drive)
5. Video Streaming (YouTube)

4/ My Process for Each System 🔍

Here’s how I’m approaching each design:

✅ Estimate Scale

✅ Define API contracts

✅ Design DB schema

✅ High-level architecture (diagrams & tradeoffs)

✅ Scaling & bottlenecks (sharding, queues, cache)

5/ First up: URL Shortener

Designing something like TinyURL sounds easybut doing it at scale is 🔥

Will share how I approached:

• Generating unique short links
• Handling collisions
• Scaling reads/writes
• DB vs cache
• (Thread coming soon…)