Curriculum

Each tier builds on the one above. Nothing is locked.

81 lessons · 7 tracks

Track 0
Foundations
7 lessons~166 min
- Bandwidth, saturation and egress24 min, Not started
- Throughput and Little's law24 min, Not started
- Back-of-envelope estimation25 min, Not started
- Percentiles and tail latency24 min, Not started
Track 1
Building blocks
15 lessons~334 min
- Transactions and isolation anomalies28 min, Not started
- API design: contracts that survive retries20 min, Not started
- Replication and quorums27 min, Not started
- Schema evolution: expand, migrate, contract18 min, Not started
- Service discovery: names, health and front doors18 min, Not started
- Search: tokens, ranking and index lag18 min, Not started
Track 2
Distributed systems
13 lessons~380 min
- CAP and PACELC25 min, Not started
- Gossip and failure detectors30 min, Not started
- Consistency models30 min, Not started
- Timeouts and deadlines25 min, Not started
- Distributed transactions: 2PC, sagas and the outbox35 min, Not started
Track 3
Reliability and operations
7 lessons~205 min
- Disaster recovery: RPO, RTO and backups30 min, Not started
- Metrics, logs and traces25 min, Not started
- Multi-region: active-passive and active-active30 min, Not started
- SLIs, SLOs and error budgets25 min, Not started
- Deployments: blue/green, canary, flags and rollback30 min, Not started
- Failure modes and metastability35 min, Not started
- Capacity planning at planet scale30 min, Not started
Track 4
Security and data
9 lessons~235 min
- Authentication and authorisation30 min, Not started
- Encryption in transit and at rest25 min, Not started
- Key management and secrets25 min, Not started
- Sessions vs JWT25 min, Not started
- Multi-tenancy isolation25 min, Not started
Track 5
Case studies
26 lessons~900 min
- Case study: Payment system & ledger35 min, Not started
Track 6
Interview craft
4 lessons~80 min
- The interview framework20 min, Not started
- Clarifying questions20 min, Not started
- Communicating trade-offs20 min, Not started
- Common interview mistakes20 min, Not started