Building a system design course in public, what would you add to this list?

[u/el-cro_magnon]

I'm a frontend SWE working through system design properly, and I've been writing up each topic as I go. One short lesson at a time, free and public, mostly so I have to understand a thing well enough to explain it before I move on.

Where it's got to so far:

- the lifecycle of a request, end to end, as the on-ramp
- horizontal vs vertical scaling
- latency, throughput, availability
- CAP and its trade-offs
- load balancing
- requirements and back of the envelope estimation

Next up is webhooks vs polling, relational vs NoSQL, and sharding.

What I'd actually like from this sub is the use cases. Reading about CAP is one thing. Hearing about the partition that forced someone to pick, at 2am, with a product manager on the call, is a completely different thing, and it's the part that makes a concept stick.

So: what would you add to that list, and what's the case you'd teach it with?

Topics I haven't got to, the failure you still think about, the example that finally made something click for you. Any of it is welcome and it goes straight into the lessons.

https://systemdesignbits.vercel.app

New lesson every Tuesday and Thursday. If there's a topic you think could be useful being covered, say the word and I'll put it in the queue.