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Let's learn about System Design via these 174 free blog posts. They are ordered by HackerNoon reader engagement data. Visit the /Learn or LearnRepo.com to find the most read blog posts about any technology.

System design is the process of defining the architecture, components, and interfaces for a system to satisfy specified requirements. It is critical for building scalable, reliable, and maintainable software systems, ensuring they meet both current and future needs.

Designing Large Scale Distributed Systems has become the standard part of the software engineering interviews. Engineers struggle with System Design Interviews (SDIs), primarily because of the following two reasons:

How can you design a large scale distributed system during an interview?

Discover key strategies for acing system design interviews in the tech industry.

These books are full of advice and avoiding costly mistakes in the initial phase of software development.

Designing an Efficient Messaging System: This article explores the key considerations and best practices for building a robust messaging system.

API Architecture Styles - REST, GraphQL, WebSocket, Webhook, RPC, SOAP

[7. Melding Hearts and Algorithms:

Building a Dating App From Scratch in 2023](https://hackernoon.com/melding-hearts-and-algorithms-building-a-dating-app-from-scratch-in-2023) In this article, you will find guidelines for building a dating app from scratch.

I recently published a post How NOT to design Netflix in your 45-minute System Design Interview?. First, surprisingly, it got pretty popular. Secondly, and even more surprisingly, several people reached out to me asking if there are any tips on what NOT to do during their coding interviews. Most of these people had the questions along the following lines:

The system design cheat sheet for caching is used to reduce latency and improve the efficiency of data retrieval across the distributed system.

Race conditions in a database and how you can solve them using techniques such as pessimistic and optimistic concurrency control.

System design with payments. Possible issues and follow-up questions

If you’re a software engineer interviewing for a backend role, you’ll probably be tested on how well you can design a system architecture given some goals and constraints. It's one of the most high-signal interviews, because it’s open-ended, which presents more opportunities for both mistakes and flexes. An important detail is that these interviews test not only your knowledge of backend systems, but also how effectively you can communicate your ideas.

Know system design fundamentals: UX components, databases, scaling strategies, security & compliance. Essential guide for developers & system design interviews.

SOLID Principles are the principles of objective oriented programming essential to develop scalable softwares. S stands for Single Responsibility Principle ...

This article argues that true engineering excellence lies not in adopting new frameworks or rewriting systems but in sustaining resilient, boring infrastructure

You starting point to a successful System Design interview round as a Frontend Developer!

In Linux, file permissions are essential to security and determine who can access, modify, or execute files and directories.

Networking Fundamentals for Systems Design.

Social media newsfeeds must be generated in near real-time based on the feed activity from the people that a user follows.

A FAANG software engineer's guide to acing the Meta system design interview. Learn to crack 9 meta system design interview questions.

Discover the key features of Load Balancers, Reverse Proxies, Forward Proxies, and API Gateways. Ideal for refreshing knowledge before System Design interview.

So I’m on zero sleep. I decided last night at 3am that it wasn’t worth waiting in bed, hoping to fall asleep anymore, having to wake up at 8am anyway. Being incredibly tired, beyond tired, loopy even, I think, “what to do?” I don’t have much to do to pack before my flight tomorrow, and I’m useless for anything productive...maybe a little Factorio?

wide-column stores, graph databases,time series databases, nosql,system design,interview,key-value,databases,document databases,columnar databases

Build production-ready LLM agents. Learn 15 principles for stability, control, and real-world reliability beyond fragile scripts and hacks.

The popular implementations of an on-demand video streaming service are the following: YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo, and TikTok. The video files are stored in a mana

In this article, we are going to talk about a system for performing authentication and authorization securely.

A practical look at designing API contracts during legacy system modernization, focusing on real production failures and strategies to prevent silent regression

Apple Vision Pro revolutionizes presentations and mind mapping for product management and system design, yet faces drawbacks, indicating room for improvement.

Message queues are a form of asynchronous service-to-service communication, including ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka, and ZeroMQ.

I was very much interested in developing distributed systems and the like. But it was very difficult to find related beginner articles. One of my projects was a cloud drive. In order to implement that, i had to go many places i haven't. It had a good steep learning curve. I wanted to share that knowledge.

A deep dive into the PACELC Theorem

Some of the popular implementations of a Kanban board are the following: Trello, JIRA, Microsoft Planner, and Asana. The changes on the board are synchronized i

Imagine — You’re in a system design interview and need to pick a database to store, let’s say, order-related data in an e-commerce system. Your data is structured and needs to be consistent, but your query pattern doesn’t match with a standard relational DB’s. You need your transactions to be isolated, and atomic and all things ACID… But OMG it needs to scale infinitely like Cassandra!! So how would you decide what storage solution to choose? Well, let’s see!

A lot of people are interested in how the computer starts up. This is where the magic begins and continues as long as the device is on. I.

Explore 25 key system design interview questions with detailed answers, covering topics like scalability, load balancing, proxies, database sharding, and more.

Learn how modern firmware supports complex features and applications. Explore the transition from BIOS to UEFI, boot processes, and OS loaders. L

How to design a scraping platform?

You'll likely be asked some system design questions when interviewing at many tech companies today. Here's how to use the whiteboard to answer them effectively.

CAP theorem proofed and explained. Why is it important? What are consistency, availability, and partition tolerance? How does it relate to distributed systems?

The thundering herd problem occurs when numerous processes simultaneously access a shared resource, overwhelming distributed systems.

That dreaded system design interview. I remember the first system design question I was asked. “Design WhatsApp”, he said. I didn’t know where to start! I was a fresher. Data structures and algorithms were the only things I knew. I am sure you can guess how that interview went. Then after enough research, I made myself a checklist of components, of sorts, to navigate me through my next system design interviews. And I sh*t you not, it works!

In backend engineering, proxies and reverse proxies are essential tools that help to manage traffic, improve performance, and enhance security.

In this article, we explore how the X (Twitter) home timeline (x.com/home) API is designed and what approaches they use to solve multiple challenges.

Enterprises adopting copilots face risks like data leaks. Learn how visibility, standards, and oversight can turn them into secure, productive tools.

This short post is written for recent graduates and current students who aim to find a job as a Software Engineer in the Tech industry and contains a list of resources to help them.

High Availability is not Disaster Recovery. This in-depth guide explores real-world Disaster Recovery architectures.

Learn a software design approach that will make you a better engineer.

In the Software Engineering world, if you are applying for a Senior Engineer/Lead/Architect or a more senior role, System Design is the most sought-after skill

DevOps for Data is not about fixing pipelines or deploying models. It’s about designing systems that remain reliable, secure, and predictable.

Discover common mistakes in ML System Design interviews and learn how to structure your approach to align technical solutions with business needs.

GPT-5's launch revealed reliability issues, slowing productivity and frustrating users. The key lesson: design systems resilient to model volatility.

Top 5 resources to get yourself ready for system design interviews, including books, courses, and interview practice platforms.

Cassandra is designed to prioritize availability and partition tolerance, making it suitable for applications where consistency is not a critical requirement.

Learn how engineers think about reliability, scalability, and maintainability—by asking the right questions early.

Learn the key stages of implementation, the role of tools like FastAPI, and the significance of algorithms like ANNs in creating personalized experiences.

This article gives a skeletal guide for designing your very own pastebin.

Build and design a low latency URL shortening service for free like TinyURL and Bitly using serverless technology with Cloudflare Worker and KV.

Scale system design interviews with these essential topics—scalability, fault tolerance, data storage, caching, message queues, and event-driven architecture.

How Discord scaled to trillions of messages using the actor model, Elixir, ScyllaDB, request coalescing, and other creative performance optimizations.

With system design, you never know what’ll be asked. Which makes it hard to practice.

Consistency, availability, and partition tolerance are the three musketeers of distributed systems. They ensure that your system operates correctly.

How ChatGPT scaled PostgreSQL to 800M users using pooling, replicas, caching, and sharding—no NoSQL migration required.

How a global ride-hailing app scaled authentication to 40 countries, cut costs by millions, and boosted login security.

Discover how visual mind maps, git-like versioning, prompt optimization, and PDF export transform LLM chat apps for efficient, organized research.

Distributed systems implement an API rate limiter for high availability and security.

What is the significance of blockchain technology in the future, why can Bitcoin be hyped for over ten years and still have such strong vitality? It is impossible to know what the future world will look like without studying these issues in depth.

Discover the LLM maturity model: from simple prompts to orchestrated systems. Why spaghetti flows fail - and how real architecture wins.

Compare Session, JWT & OAuth2 authentication strategies. Learn when to use each method with architecture diagrams, pros/cons & decision frameworks.

Most developers use LLMs as a "Junior Developer" to write boilerplate. The real 10x leverage comes from using LLMs as a "Hostile Principal Engineer."

In this post, I want to describe the context of these issues and how I solved them both with the same tool.

At 90% accuracy per step, a 20-step agent succeeds 12% of the time. Your demo didn't show you that. Production will.

Learn the differences between L4 and L7 Load Balancers, optimize traffic, secure apps, and enhance performance for efficient network management.

Comprehensive guide to Go concurrency: goroutines, mutexes, WaitGroups, and condition variables with examples, best practices, and gotchas.

The term “industrial electronics” refers to any electrical equipment or system used for manufacturing goods or participating in this process indirectly.

This article provides a simple and clear introduction to the OSI model, a conceptual framework for understanding network communication protocols.

SigFox has notable data size limitations; while it can be good for several IoT applications, it limits the smart street lighting E2E capabilities.

Dive deep into the many layers of caching in modern systems from browser and CDN to app memory and database internals. Learn strategies, consistency models.

LLM chat apps need better cross-platform sync. Key features: manual refresh button, draft saving, tagging system, offline queues, bandwidth management & more.

Agile product managers: stop writing specs like code. Learn how to balance adaptability and detail without over-engineering software requirements.

You don’t need sprints to ship good products. You just need clear focus, quick feedback loops, and the discipline to actually finish things before moving on.

A practical, no-nonsense guide to getting your vibe-coded app live with a PaaS, without falling into DevOps rabbit holes.

Learn how to navigate the complexities of translating business requirements into technical solutions.

Learn how backpressure helps distributed systems stay resilient under load. Explore real-world patterns to manage flow control, retries, and queue buildup.

Revolutionizing bank operations: Migrating core systems & innovating seamless authentication integration for optimal performance.

Explore corporate information system integration, its strategic tasks, and challenges. Learn about EDA, ESB, ETL, security, software architecture, and more.

This article proposes a mindset shift in using LLMs: instead of using them to generate code, use them to aggressively critique and "break" architectural designs

This article will discuss compression in the Big Data context, covering the types and methods of compression

Perfect dashboards don’t mean perfect systems. Explore how observability debt hides behind metrics, distorts truth, and weakens engineering judgment in 2025.

CAP theorem isn't about picking two. Learn what Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance actually mean and how production systems handle trade-offs.

Confused by cookies, tokens, and API keys? This guide breaks down 6 common authentication methods — Basic Auth, Cookies, Tokens, API Keys, OTP, and SSO!

In 2025, the developer's role is shifting from a manual "writer" to a strategic "orchestrator," managing teams of digital agents that can self-correct.

The next wave of great software isn't just integrated with AI; it's architected for AI.

AI is a powerful accelerator for writing code and optimizing queries, but it lacks the contextual understanding to make high-stakes architectural trade-offs.

Infrastructure as Code is a way to manage cloud resources using code. Learn how to manage a PaaS using APIs.

Why AI startups destabilize 30 days after a raise. Capital scales complexity before architecture is hardened, and drift begins.

Latency sensitive financial systems favor predictable behavior and controlled execution paths, even as tools, infrastructure, and languages continue to evolve.

Redis doesn’t track expirations with sorted lists, it uses randomness. Learn how its probabilistic key cleanup keeps speed, memory, and simplicity in balance.

AI coding isn’t about typing faster. It’s about shifting from syntax to system design—and why architects, not typists, will win in 2026.

Boost system resilience and scalability by splitting services into self-contained cells with dedicated routing, reducing failure impact and deployment risk.

This article details a horizontally scalable, distributed timer service achieving 100 K timer creations per second with millisecond precision.

In this article, we'll be discussing a template that can be used to structure your responses in a system-design interview...

At first glance, the promise of concurrency is appealing, but lurking beneath that promise are several complex challenges.

Boost your developer skills with Open-source. Learn about Linux kernel data structures, Kubernetes architectural design and PostgreSQL algorithms.

I designed an autonomous REIT where AI, blockchain, and automation replace intermediaries—handling leasing, rent, and dividends end-to-end. With on-chain settle

A senior engineer perspective on bucket metadata, negative caches, and surviving random-key floods.

The architectural and security failure of adding AI into existing systems without proper system design - the Obsidian support case.

Remember: it’s difficult at first, but soon you’ll be swimming like a fish in water.

Your go‑to guide for understanding system design end‑to‑end—clear explanations of High‑Level and Low‑Level Design with everything you need to get started

Learn how to build auditable AI systems by separating deterministic decision authority from LLM-generated explanations, preventing explanation drift

One of the leading Free TON development teams - RSquad shares its experience in information systems design and teamwork

As per Gartner, almost 80 percent of every emerging technology will have Artificial Intelligence as the backbone by the end of 2021. Building secure software is a no mean feat. Amid the lingering cybersecurity threats and the potential challenges posed by the endpoint inadequacies, the focus is continuously shifting towards machine learning and the relevant AI implementations for strengthening the existing app and software security standards.

10/25/2023: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!

API Gateways are often a component of a microservices architecture. But they are not a silver bullet - they have some downsides to consider!

GDPR's "right to be forgotten" just redesigned your database. HIPAA moved your PHI to a separate infrastructure. Here’s how compliance shapes architecture.

AI and LLMs can automate coding, but engineers remain essential. Explore how AI will grow software development and drives innovation.

A practical, experience-driven guide to designing a multi-seller B2B SaaS platform with Stripe Connect Express and Webhooks.

Every tutorial forces you to pick one, then spends 2000 words explaining why the other one is terrible.

How I redesigned a ride-hailing order form for 360M users inside a 7-year-old monolith. Lessons on legacy code, user habits, and breaking production.

It is imperative for any system to critically deal with any kind of data. If compromised, it brings harm to users, and organizations

Throttling is not a one-time setup but a continuous process of fine-tuning and balancing.

Discover the nuances of Horizontal and Vertical Scaling in system architecture—key strategies, advantages, and considerations for optimal performance.

Read how to design, build, and deploy a serverless Pastebin clone using Cloudflare Worker and KV to upload and share text through links.

Stop feeding AI buggy, Zero-Sum ethics. An architect presents a master plan for a new ethical OS built on consistency, cohesion, and human agency.

11/20/2025: Top 5 stories on the HackerNoon homepage!

Learn how to transform your rough system design ideas into effective solutions with this comprehensive guide.

Microservices become unpredictable with AI. Learn why AI breaks traditional assumptions and how to design resilient, failure-ready systems.b

Building a system that can handle large amounts of traffic and respond in a responsible time is the eventual goal of any system design problem.

Low-level design for a high-volume concurrent logging library.

Explore consistency guarantees like read-after-write, monotonic reads, and consistent prefixes in the second series on replication in distributed systems.

LeetCode interviews measure pattern recall, not engineering skill. Here's why the old model is broken, and what better hiring actually looks like.

Rethinking UNIQUE INDEXes: Explore why they can be costly and problematic in large-scale, why application-layer uniqueness checks are more flexible and robust

Unlock the Power of Real-Time Data with Kafka: A Deep Dive into the Fast and Scalable System Design Championed by Kafka. Learn More!

Joblet is a lightweight process isolation platform that lets you run commands and scripts in secure, resource-controlled environments.

Lock in as we delve deeper into the intricacies of building robust and scalable distributed systems.

Availability refers to the ability of a system to remain operational and accessible to users even in the face of various failures, disruptions, and maintenance.

Over-optimizing high-load systems can backfire. Georgy Starikov shares when performance matters and when it harms long-term engineering intuition.

Fast systems rarely fail because they’re slow. They fail because they’re misdirected. Why interpretation debt now matters more than technical debt.

LLM-powered daily newsletters stuck repeating content? Learn why RAG stops too early and how local caching creates unique, diverse outputs every day.

4/26/2025: Top 5 stories on the HackerNoon homepage!

This article examines how modern AI agents evolve from isolated models into cooperative networks exhibiting social‑like behavior.

When exposing an application to the outside world, consider a Reverse-Proxy or an API Gateway to protect it from attacks.

Naive retry logic can cause retry storms in distributed systems, amplifying failures and leading to cascading outages. Learn safer retry strategies.C

10/31/2023: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!

Incremental design results in a working system at the end of implementation. On the other hand, iterative design produces a functioning system

A real-world failure shows why distributed systems must be designed for failure, not success, using circuit breakers, timeouts, and resilience patterns.

Retries are important for service availability in distributed systems, but too many can cause problems.

Maintain atomicity in distributed systems with protocols like Two-Phase Commit and the Saga Pattern, addressing challenges in microservices environments.

How Reddit scaled from a single Python server to a resilient architecture that could handle millions. A story of caching, queues, and the chaos of success.

11/23/2025: Top 5 stories on the HackerNoon homepage!

A deep dive into how Final Destination: Bloodlines reboots horror with tech-inspired storytelling, exploring fate as a flawed system.

AI systems often fail when switching models due to their rigid design. Learn how to build flexible, modular AI systems that adapt to change.

Explore leaderless replication in distributed systems, from ensuring quorum consistency to implementing Last Write Wins, conflict resolution and version vectors

Let’s start by understanding about few terminologies and some facts related to this article and come on common ground.

In this post, I offer another alternative to chop the monolith. Instead of forking the call on the client side, we fork the call on the Gateway side.

Network IO, epoll, event loops. Learn how servers efficiently handle thousands of connections without blocking threads

Real-time fraud detection requires both speed and accuracy - hybrid event-based aggregation delivers both.

Explore the detailed system design of vAttention, which leverages separate virtual and physical memory allocation to enable dynamic KV-cache management

Dive into the intricacies of databases, starting from the simplest key-value store using bash functions to the complexities of LSM trees and B-trees.

How agentic AI with MCP protocols is replacing complex UI development. Learn to build systems with LLMs at the center, ship features in days, not months.

9/29/2023: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!

Explore 5 advanced data structures that go beyond arrays and linked lists. Learn how B-Trees, Bloom Filters, Radix Trees, and more power modern systems.

Discover practical caching patterns for distributed systems. Master cache reliability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization techniques for scalable arc

Understand O(1) time complexity and why constant-time operations matter for scalable systems and high-performance software.

10/8/2023: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!

Learn what interviewers actually evaluate in system design interviews, from requirements and estimates to trade-offs, bottlenecks, and judgment.

Microservices, Kafka, sharding, event sourcing... these are the words of the gods, the hallmarks of a real senior engineer, right?

Your distributed lock is silently failing. Learn how GC pauses and clock skew break DynamoDB, Redis, and ZooKeeper locks and how fencing tokens close the gap.

How defining states, not features, rebuilt reliability in a live payments system.

11/5/2023: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!

4/21/2023: Top 5 stories on the Hackernoon homepage!

High accuracy doesn’t mean reliable AI. This story explains why real-world systems fail—and how predictable behavior drives adoption.

Explore quick cache challenges, systematic design, and expert strategies to avoid technical debt for maintainable architectures.