The Curriculum
Seven tracks, from fetch() down to packets and pages, through to distributed systems and interview craft.
Two deep tracks — networking and databases — go all the way down to packets and pages. The other five stages build back up: the building blocks, the consistency trade-offs, the APIs, the distributed patterns, and the worked case studies an interview actually asks for.
Track NDeep track
Networking, under the hood
The full life of a request: from fetch() in your code down to packets, and back.
Track DDeep track
Databases, under the hood
How Postgres actually executes your query: pages, B-trees, WAL, MVCC.
Stage 1
Core building blocks
Load balancers, caches, CDNs, object storage, queues, rate limiting.
Stage 2
Data & consistency at scale
Replication, CAP/PACELC, consistency models, quorums, conflicts.
Stage 3
Communication & APIs
REST vs gRPC vs WebSockets, idempotency, pagination, versioning, backpressure.
Stage 4
Distributed patterns
Event-driven systems, outbox, sagas, consensus, the exactly-once myth.
Stage 5
Case studies & interview craft
Worked designs — chat, feed, dispatch, ledger — with the interview framework.