System Design Roadmap

Thanks for sharing about Quastor. OP - thanks for YT videos.

I’ve actually been trying to find a better tool for going through engineering blogs, they can be very hit or miss and I haven’t exactly fallen in love with any aggregators that I’ve tried yet. I’ll check this out. I think Devoxx actually also came out with a pretty sweet tool recently for searching those really long conference videos on channels like InfoQ

it’s always great to hear that people legitimately find it helpful :)

“How is this different from system design primer by donne-martin?” Donne Martin’s does actual coverage of concepts, which I strictly do not do. The roadmap just compiles all the resources out there and whether they’re good or not (I really do have a physical copy of over 20 system design books, so I really have read Lewis Lin and Stanley Chiang’s books.) This is also why Donne Martin’s content is one of the materials *in* the roadmap — I’m building on top of it, not trying to replace it with something better The channel also has negligible concept coverage, it’s mainly real interview questions, which Donne Martin’s content didn’t cover very thoroughly

I haven’t really seen the study guides section of leetcode discussion forums before, I’ll check out your post :)

I’m in Seattle? 🤷‍♂️ Also, currently ICT-4, and this is all just prepping for scoring a staff/principal role in my next hop for staff at Google, you need machine count estimates AND end-to-end latency estimates (which I haven’t done a ton of practice with) I guess I’m flattered though lol

I have actually specifically dodged the topic of ML system design 🙈 I took a shot at every single problem in that book ahead of its release, and even got a physical copy of the book within a few days of it first getting put up and listed on amazon.com… What I’d like to do is add a new column with the following: - Khang Pham’s book - Chip Huyen’s book - Alex Xu’s ML book - the “MMDS” book (almost all of which I have a physical copy of…) Ranking / evaluating them takes a decent chunk of effort though compared to other things I could be doing, so it keeps getting put off though 💀🪦

Would you say grokking is necessary to fill in the gaps left by Alex Xu’s book? Would Stanley Chung’s book be better for these gaps than grokking?

it’s in the OP https://discord.gg/hB85NVE

Oh shoot, try this one: https://discord.gg/fmzEDxza

I just learned that just keep clicking for bent arrows thing within the past month! :) Thanks for the input on pressing “5”; I’ll learn the numeric shortcuts for the next session. I also learned within the past couple months about being able to rotate the shapes… I think one of my favorite improvements that I’ve made over the past few months is using a library of colored components (you’ll notice in my first few videos that I just drew plain white boxes 😣) Thanks a ton for the input! I’ll definitely try to start those shortcuts as a new habit in the next stream. Feel free to let me know if you think of anything else; I appreciate it :)

Database Internals - will literally tell you some stuff about implementing LSM-trees and B-trees - explains how distributed transactions work in 3-4 different systems, including Spanner and Calvin - has an overview of 6-8 different variations of paxos (e.g. egalitarian paxos, multi-paxos, raft, ZAB) Understanding Distributed Systems is definitely more shallow, but it did give *a little* more insight on a couple things like orchestration and chain replication. Database Internals did seem to provide new info, but I’d only recommend it if you’ve finished DDIA, shooting for staff, and you’re hungry for more (like me). I found whitepapers to be fairly dry and hard to digest, but Database Internals could explain some deeper concepts than DDIA a bit better than them. Understanding Distributed Systems would probably only be a good idea if you’re one of those who found DDIA “too deep” or “too dry”. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re really scraping for more content or just want to possibly see some concepts in a new light. TL;DR: if you finished reading DDIA, you can consider Database Internals next. (Also, pro tip: there’s this website called libgen.li that’s a great resource to “try before you buy”, but an electronic copy will never be as great of an experience as a physical copy.)

Another thing that I’d like to throw out there is that, depending on what your goal is, you might actually want to look at more applied problems before going into further depth with concepts. Both Alex Xu’s books should probably be on your shelf before getting either of the above. Also, Stanley Chiang actually has a criminally underrated book — maybe not as good as Alex Xu Volume II, but it definitely impressed me.