L1
Honest Take — Before You Begin
Honest reflections on thinking bigger than a single application
preview →
Course · 5 lessons
~50 hr
Advanced
System Design for Rails Engineers
Think at the system level — designing distributed systems, choosing architectural building blocks, and reasoning about scale, reliability, and trade-offs.
reading · we frame, you read MIT or the canonical
taught · we author, no canonical fits
↺ spirals back to earlier lessons
Course locked
Complete Deployment, Infrastructure & Production Operations first.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
L2
Read: Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann)
Approach: READ cover-to-cover, slowly
primary
Martin Kleppmann's lectures
locked
L3
Read: Web Scalability for Startup Engineers
Approach: SELECTIVE: chapters relevant to Rails
primary
Martin Kleppmann's lectures
locked
L4
Module Checklist
Work through each item before the checkpoint.
locked
L5
Checkpoint: Design a system from scratch (e.g., a URL shortener, a no...
Design a system from scratch (e.g., a URL shortener, a notification system, or a real-time analytics dashboard). Write a complete design document with: requirements, capacity esti…
locked
5 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.