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SystemDesignAtlas
TIME-BASED STUDY CURRICULUMS

Tailored System Design Study Roadmaps

Choose a structured learning track calibrated to your timeline — whether you have 1 week to cram before an interview or 3 months for Staff-level mastery.

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Urgent Prep ROADMAP

1-Week High-Yield Interview Sprint

Tailored for engineers with interviews in 7 days. Focuses exclusively on high-impact architectural patterns: latency physics, L4/L7 load balancing, database indexing, sharding, consistent hashing, Raft, caching, Kafka, and top 4 interview designs.

Track Progress:0%
0 of 16 high-yield topics finished
Duration: 7 Days
Pacing: 2 Hours / Day
Curated Topics: 15
Milestones: 7 Stages
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Step-by-Step Curriculum Syllabus

Day 1

Core Fundamentals & Latency Physics

2 Targeted Topics

Requirements scoping and hardware latency physics.

#1What System Design Is & Functional vs Non-Functional Requirements

Scoping functional vs non-functional requirements (SLA, latency, throughput).

6 min read
#15Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know

Memorize L1/RAM vs SSD vs Cross-datacenter RTT for sizing calculations.

9 min read
Day 2

Traffic Routing & Rate Limiting

2 Targeted Topics

Layer 4/7 proxies, SSL offloading, and traffic defense.

#27Layer 4 vs Layer 7 Load Balancing

TCP vs HTTP routing, SSL termination, and reverse proxies.

9 min read
#128Rate Limiting Algorithms: Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, & Sliding Window

Token Bucket & Sliding Window algorithms for API gateways.

10 min read
Day 3

Databases: Indexing, Sharding & Consistent Hashing

3 Targeted Topics

Scaling stateful storage horizontally with zero hot partitions.

#45Indexing — B-Trees and Lookup Speed (O(log N))

B-Trees and clustered indexes turn O(N) full scans into O(log N) lookups.

9 min read
#60Sharding (Horizontal Partitioning) Concepts

Horizontal sharding strategies and mitigating hot partitions.

9 min read
#64Consistent Hashing with Virtual Nodes

Consistent hashing rings with virtual nodes for minimal data migration.

9 min read
Day 4

Distributed Consensus & Caching

3 Targeted Topics

Consistency models, Raft leader election, and cache patterns.

#76The CAP Theorem

CAP theorem: Consistency vs Availability during network partitions.

9 min read
#84Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus

Raft consensus, heartbeats, randomized election timeouts, and majority quorum.

9 min read
#98Cache-Aside (Lazy Loading)

Cache-Aside vs Write-Through vs Write-Back strategies.

8 min read
Day 5

Asynchronous Messaging & Idempotency

2 Targeted Topics

Decoupled architectures with commit logs and safe retries.

#113Kafka Deep Dive: Topics, Partitions, Brokers, & Consumer Groups

Kafka commit logs, partitions, and consumer groups.

10 min read
#134Idempotency Keys in API Design

Idempotency keys for payment and ordering APIs.

9 min read
Day 6

Microservices Resilience & Fault Isolation

2 Targeted Topics

Preventing cascading failures across distributed microservices.

#148The Circuit Breaker Pattern: States & Transitions

Circuit Breaker pattern states (Closed, Open, Half-Open).

10 min read
#150Retry Strategies: Exponential Backoff & Jitter

Retry with exponential backoff and jitter.

9 min read
Day 7

Top Practice Problems & Interview Execution

2 Targeted Topics

End-to-end rehearsal of the two most asked system design questions.

#230Design a URL Shortener (TinyURL / Bitly)

Base62 encoding, Key Generation Service (ZooKeeper), and Redis cache tier.

9 min read
#231Design a Distributed Rate Limiter

Distributed token bucket rate limiter with Redis Lua scripts.

9 min read