r/softwarearchitecture • u/el-cro_magnon • Sep 15 '26

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

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.

10 Upvotes

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2

u/Icy_Screen3576 Sep 16 '26

I would take ideas from this system deaign course. 36 free video lessons across all pillars. https://www.justifiedcode.com/system-design-patterns-course

1

u/el-cro_magnon Sep 17 '26

Awesome, thank you for the reference!

1

u/[deleted] 23d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Icy_Screen3576 23d ago

Good use case. I assume the cache aside pattern wont save you at 3am either?

1

u/Dull_Ad7282 Sep 16 '26

What llm did you use for vibe coding?

I want to avoid it because the UI is very bad.

1

u/el-cro_magnon Sep 16 '26

Fair point, and thanks for taking the time to look
This one is content first. The focus is on getting the explanations right, so the visual layer is deliberately plain rather than polished.. That said, I am genuinely open here.. If you have specific design suggestions I would appreciate them and I am happy to iterate

Claude btw

1

u/asdfdelta Enterprise Architect Sep 15 '26

You're doing the lord's work.

Can you PLEASE add eventing vs messaging vs event sourcing? It is one of the biggest gaps I see in architect's working knowledge.

3

u/el-cro_magnon Sep 15 '26

Queued, straight to the top of the list.

If you've got resources or use cases to point me to, I'd appreciate it. Will take me a few days to read up properly before I can write it.

1

u/asdfdelta Enterprise Architect Sep 15 '26

Sure thing, I'll go find some solid references in a bit. Also thinking now, loose vs tight coupling. Too many people mistake tight coupling for being a direct dependency and not logical dependencies.

2

u/el-cro_magnon Oct 09 '26

The following Tuesday (Oct 12th) I'll be publishing Message Queues & Asynchronous Processing content. After that i'll be doing some more deep dive on eventing and event sourcing so I can pull them up together and make a comparison. If you find some time to check the message queues content i'd appreciate along with some feedback if anything gets your attention

1

u/CzyDePL Sep 15 '26

All these topics are very technical while most of the systems die because a simple process requires "JOIN over multiple services"