System Design and Design Patterns

Goal: answer senior-level design rounds with crisp requirements, tradeoffs, scalable architecture, reliability thinking, and clean object/design-pattern vocabulary.

WeekFocusOutput
Week 1Design interview framework, requirements, APIs, estimation, SOLID, factory/strategy/observer2 lightweight designs, 1 pattern summary
Week 2Load balancing, caching, queues, rate limiting, adapter/decorator/command2 designs, tradeoff notes
Week 3Storage, indexing, replication, sharding, consistency, repository/unit-of-work2 designs, storage decision table
Week 4Distributed systems, availability, idempotency, retries, circuit breaker, saga2 designs, failure-mode checklist
Week 5Observability, logging, metrics, tracing, security, auth, facade/proxy2 designs, operational readiness notes
Week 6Microsoft-style product systems: collaboration, files, notifications, feeds3 end-to-end designs
Week 7Mock design interviews and pattern integration4 mocks, review gaps
Week 8Final design review and reusable templates2 polished designs, final cheat sheet

Design Drill Template

Delivery Framework

  • Requirements:
  • Scale:
  • APIs:
  • Data model:
  • High-level architecture:
  • Bottlenecks:
  • Tradeoffs:
  • Failure modes:
  • Follow-ups: