System Design Cheatsheet - 2025April

📘 Must-Read Book:

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann → A goldmine for understanding how real systems scale and survive under pressure.

🎓 Paid Courses Worth It:

• Grokking the System Design Interview (Educative)
• System Design Interview Guide (ByteByteGo) → Structured, scenario-driven, and worth every penny.

🎥 Free (and Powerful) Resources:

• YouTube: Martin Kleppmann’s talks, SystemDesignInterview channel
• GitHub: System Design Primer repo—bookmark this if you haven’t already

💻 Practice Platforms:

• LeetCode & InterviewBit for mock questions
• Blogs from Netflix, Airbnb, Uber = real-world design insights

🔧 Hands-On Learning:

• Study how Google Bigtable, Amazon DynamoDB, and Apache Kafka handle data at scale

Nothing beats learning from systems built for billions.

TL;DR:

System design isn’t just for interviews.

It’s a skill you’ll need as you grow into staff+ roles, build distributed systems, or lead technical decision-making.