My Tech Learning Continues !

Sivalingaamorthy Subramaniam

3 min readMar 14, 2024

Real-world system architectures are invaluable resources for learning system design

Practical Applications: Learning about theoretical concepts is important, but seeing them applied in real-world systems provides a deeper understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs.
Exposure to Diverse Solutions: By studying how different companies tackle similar challenges, you’ll gain a broader perspective on design options and best practices.
Understanding Technology Context: Learning about the technologies used in these systems helps you connect the dots between theoretical concepts and their practical implementation.
Focus on Both Principles and Technologies: Understanding both the “why” and “how” of system design is crucial. Principles provide a foundation for making informed decisions, while technologies offer the tools to implement those decisions.
Active Learning: Don’t just passively read about these systems. Ask yourself questions like:
What are the key challenges this system addresses?
What design choices were made and why?
Are there alternative approaches that could be considered?

Additional Resources:

Beyond the websites, here are some resources for exploring real-world system architectures:

Blogs: Many tech companies maintain blogs where they discuss their engineering practices and system design decisions. (e.g., Netflix Tech Blog, Airbnb Engineering & Data Science Blog)
Conference Talks: Search for conference talks related to system design. Platforms like YouTube often have recordings of these talks.
Case Studies: Many software development companies publish case studies that delve into specific projects and the system design they employed.

Real-world systems

Understand design ideas of real system architectures behind different companies.

Facebook Timeline: Brought To You By The Power Of Denormalization: https://goo.gl/FCNrbm

Scale at Facebook: https://goo.gl/NGTdCs

Building Timeline: Scaling up to hold your life story: https://goo.gl/8p5wDV

Erlang at Facebook (Facebook chat): https://goo.gl/zSLHrj

Facebook Chat: https://goo.gl/qzSiWC

Finding a needle in Haystack: Facebook’s photo storage: https://goo.gl/edj4FL

Serving Facebook Multifeed: Efficiency, performance gains through redesign: https://goo.gl/adFVMQ

Scaling Memcache at Facebook: https://goo.gl/rZiAhX

TAO: Facebook’s Distributed Data Store for the Social Graph: https://goo.gl/Tk1DyH

Amazon Architecture: https://goo.gl/k4feoW

Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store: https://goo.gl/C7zxDL

A 360 Degree View Of The Entire Netflix Stack: https://goo.gl/rYSDTz

It’s All A/Bout Testing: The Netflix Experimentation Platform: https://goo.gl/agbA4K

Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars (Part 1): https://goo.gl/A4FkYi

Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars (Part 2): https://goo.gl/XNPMXm

Google Architecture: https://goo.gl/dvkDiY

The Google File System (Google Docs): https://goo.gl/xj5n9R

Differential Synchronization (Google Docs): https://goo.gl/9zqG7x

YouTube Architecture: https://goo.gl/mCPRUF

Seattle Conference on Scalability: YouTube Scalability: https://goo.gl/dH3zYq

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data: https://goo.gl/6NaZca

Instagram Architecture: 14 Million Users, Terabytes Of Photos, 100s Of Instances, Dozens Of Technologies: https://goo.gl/s1VcW5

The Architecture Twitter Uses To Deal With 150M Active Users: https://goo.gl/EwvfRd

Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster: https://goo.gl/nYGC1k

Announcing Snowflake (Snowflake is a network service for generating unique ID numbers at high scale with some simple guarantees): https://goo.gl/GzVWYm

Timelines at Scale: https://goo.gl/8KbqTy

How Uber Scales Their Real-Time Market Platform: https://goo.gl/kGZuVy

Scaling Pinterest: https://goo.gl/KtmjW3

Pinterest Architecture Update: https://goo.gl/w6rRsf

A Brief History of Scaling LinkedIn: https://goo.gl/8A1Pi8

Flickr Architecture: https://goo.gl/dWtgYa

How We’ve Scaled Dropbox: https://goo.gl/NjBDtC

The WhatsApp Architecture Facebook Bought For $19 Billion: https://bit.ly/2AHJnFn

Company engineering blogs

Reading engineering blogs from potential employers and industry leaders is a fantastic way to prepare for interviews and stay up-to-date on the latest trends.

Here’s a list of engineering blogs from well-known large companies and startups, along with some insights into why they’re valuable:

Airbnb: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering

Amazon: https://developer.amazon.com/blogs

Asana: https://blog.asana.com/category/eng

Atlassian: https://developer.atlassian.com/blog

Bittorrent: http://engineering.bittorrent.com

Cloudera: https://blog.cloudera.com

Docker: https://blog.docker.com

Dropbox: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech

eBay: http://www.ebaytechblog.com

Facebook: https://code.facebook.com/posts

GitHub: https://githubengineering.com