12 Topics to Truly Understand System Design

Post by Fernando Franco — 12 topics to learn system design properly, one per week

“Most engineers learn system design by memorizing diagrams for the interview. The moment the question changes, it all falls apart.”

The 12-Week Curriculum

Week	Topic	Key Focus
1	Requirements	From vague problem to clear design — the step everyone skips
2	Back-of-the-envelope	Estimate capacity before you design
3	Latency & Throughput	The two numbers everything trades against
4	Availability	Design for high availability and measure it
5	Scaling Techniques	Server clones, functional partitioning, data partitioning
6	Load Balancers	Use them well in distributed systems
7	Caching	Read/write strategies, invalidation, TTL done right
8	Replication	Single-leader, multi-leader, leaderless
9	Sharding	Faster, more scalable, more available data layer
10	Consistency Models	They decide your whole design
11	Why Distributed Systems Fail	Common failure modes and blast radius
12	Raft	How consensus actually works

Key Takeaway

Don’t memorize diagrams. Learn the fundamentals — requirements, tradeoffs, failure modes. Then any design question becomes solvable.

Source

Each week has a detailed LinkedIn post with links (see original post).