4-Week System Design Study Plan
Week 1 - Fundamentals: Scalability, Availability, Components
Goal: Build a mental model of what “system design” even covers before touching distributed systems specifics.
- Day 1 - What is System Design? ByteByteGo’s YouTube channel is the standard entry point, run by the authors of the System Design Interview book series.
https://www.youtube.com/@ByteByteGo - start with any “System Design Basics” or “How X Works” video from the channel.
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Day 2 - Distributed Systems, Beginner Level Distributed Systems Explained Simply | System Design for Software Engineer
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Day 3–5 - Scalability, Load Balancing, Caching Web Journey with Kashish’s playlist is real and covers exactly this sequence (15 videos, fundamentals → advanced). Watch straight through rather than trusting specific video numbers for specific topics - the numbering wasn’t independently verifiable. System Design Tutorial Series (2025)
Weekend practice: Pick a system (Twitter, YouTube, Instagram) and sketch APIs, data model, components, caching, and scaling approach. No correctness bar - just practice structured thinking.
Week 2 - Distributed Systems, Data & Storage
Goal: Sharding, replication, CAP, queues, consistency.
- Days 1–5 - SQL vs NoSQL, CAP theorem, sharding, replication, queues Continue the Web Journey with Kashish playlist above - it covers all five topics across its 15 videos. System Design Tutorial Series (2025)
For a second, deeper pass on each concept, Hello Interview’s Core Concepts section is excellent and unambiguous - useful if a playlist video is fuzzy on a topic: System Design in a Hurry : Core Concepts
Weekend deep dive: Pick Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS and sketch how you’d integrate it into a large system for resilience.
Week 3 - Fault Tolerance, Resilience, Real-World Systems
Goal: Redundancy, graceful degradation, and a real large-scale case study.
- Days 1–3 - Failure handling, fault tolerance, reliability patterns
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Day 4 - Real-World Architecture: YouTube HLD, LLD, class structures, DB schema, API design - System Design of Youtube
- Day 5 - Microservices Architecture How to Migrate from Monolith to Microservices (Step-by-Step) - covers benefits/trade-offs along the way.
Weekend journal: How would you make YouTube more fault tolerant? Think CDN failures, DB failover, cache invalidation, hotspots.
Week 4 - Trade-Offs & Interview Mastery
Goal: Architect-level reasoning and interview-format practice.
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Day 1 - Monolith to Microservices (deeper) 𝗠𝗶𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗰 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗠𝗶𝗰𝗿𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗛𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀-𝗢𝗻 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹-𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗖𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆
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Day 2 - Interview Roadmap Hello Interview’s How to Prepare page. How to Prepare for System Design Interviews
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Day 3 - Consolidation Consolidating before interview practice.
https://www.youtube.com/@ByteByteGo
- Day 4 - Advanced Systems Thinking Conference (TigerBeetle’s Systems Distributed), talks land on YouTube after each event - search “Systems Distributed” + year on YouTube for the current batch
https://systemsdistributed.com
- Day 5 - Trade-Off Master Class Built by FAANG hiring managers/staff engineers specifically to teach trade-off reasoning under interview constraints. System Design in a Hurry - Introduction
Weekend capstone: Design one from scratch - Twitter Timeline, Uber, Instagram, or YouTube (deeper this time). Cover: requirements, capacity estimates, components, DB/schema, scaling, caching, fault tolerance, trade-offs (why X over Y).