Beginner system design playlist
The 36-video beginner playlist, ordered by week and tagged so you know what to watch now and what to skip.
This is Arpit Bhayani's beginner system design playlist: 36 videos, 20 to 30 minutes each, about 15 hours in total. The videos are downloaded, so there are no links on this page. Open them from your local folder in the order below.
Do not binge it. Watch two or three videos a week, next to the project work that needs them, and keep a notebook of diagrams. The "When" column tells you the week from the 34-week plan that each video belongs to.
The Storm notes PDF
Storm-System-Design-Notes (Arpit Bhayani).pdf sits in the beginner folder as a local companion. It is a file on your disk, not a link, and it covers the Storm material used in the masterclass. Read it only when a video sends you there.
How to use this playlist
Play at 1.25x, or 1.5x once the topic is familiar. Pause at every diagram.
Redraw the diagram from memory on paper before you continue. If you cannot, rewatch the last two minutes.
Write three lines of notes: the problem, the component that solves it, and the trade-off.
Log the video against its week in your tracker. Do not move to the next week with an empty log line.
Where the weeks fall
| Phase | Weeks | What you are building |
|---|---|---|
| Ledgerline | 1 to 7 | A ledger with correctness guarantees |
| Logsmith | 8 to 13 | A log store with its own read path |
| Shiplane | 14 to 19 | Deployment and operations for both services |
| Ops and mocks | 20 to 25 | Stability, incidents and interview drills |
| Interview season | 26 to 34 | Applications, mocks and offers |
The early modules carry the project work. The later modules carry the interviews. Both matter, and the level column tells you which rows you may defer.
The modules
Foundations (videos 1 to 4)
Four short videos that set the vocabulary for everything after them. Watch these in weeks 4 and 5, next to the first Ledgerline milestone.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Course Introduction | Week 4 | SDE-1 must |
| 2 | What is System Design | Week 4 | SDE-1 must |
| 3 | How to approach system design | Week 5 | SDE-1 must |
| 4 | How do you evaluate that you have built a good system | Week 5 | SDE-1 must |
After this module you can explain the difference between system design and coding, and list four ways to judge whether a design is any good.
Databases (videos 5 to 10)
The largest module, and the one that pays off fastest. Ledgerline is a Postgres project, so these videos land while you are writing real queries.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Relational Databases | Week 6 | SDE-1 must |
| 6 | Databse Isolation Levels | Week 6 | SDE-1 must |
| 7 | Scaling Databases | Week 7 | SDE-1 must |
| 8 | Sharding and Partitioning | Week 7 | SDE-1 must |
| 9 | Non-Relational Databases | Week 8 | SDE-1 must |
| 10 | Picking the right database | Week 8 | SDE-1 must |
After this module you can draw a primary with replicas, explain what a transaction isolation level buys and costs, and defend a database choice in one sentence.
Caching (videos 11 to 13)
Caching is the first thing an interviewer adds to your design. Learn it while Ledgerline's read path is fresh.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | What is caching | Week 8 | SDE-1 must |
| 12 | Populating and scaling a cache | Week 9 | SDE-1 must |
| 13 | Caching at different levels | Week 9 | SDE-1 must |
After this module you can draw a cache in front of a database, name the write policy, and explain what happens on a miss and on a stale hit.
Queues and streaming (videos 14 to 16)
Logsmith is a log store, so this module is its reading list. Watch it in the weeks you build the append path.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14 | Message Brokers and Queues | Week 9 | SDE-1 must |
| 15 | Message Stream and Kafka Essentials | Week 10 | SDE-1 must |
| 16 | Realtime Pubsub | Week 10 | SDE-1 must |
After this module you can explain the difference between a queue and a log, and sketch a producer, a broker and three consumers without notes.
Load balancing and resilience (videos 17 to 19)
Three videos on keeping traffic moving when a machine dies. They land at the end of Logsmith, before Shiplane puts both services behind one entry point.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | Load Balancers | Week 11 | SDE-1 must |
| 18 | Circuit Balancers | Week 11 | SDE-1 must |
| 19 | Data Redundancy _ Recovery | Week 12 | SDE-1 must |
After this module you can place a load balancer, explain what a circuit breaker stops, and say where your data's second copy lives.
Recovery, protocols and storage (videos 20 to 22)
Durability and agreement, then the two pieces most answers leave out: how clients talk to you, and where large files go.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | Leader Election for auto-recovery | Week 12 | SDE-1 must |
| 21 | Client server model _ Communication protocols | Week 13 | SDE-1 must |
| 22 | Blob Storage _ S3 | Week 13 | SDE-1 must |
After this module you can explain how a cluster picks a new leader, compare polling with a socket, and say when a file belongs in object storage rather than a database.
Advanced building blocks and big data (videos 23 to 25)
Two building blocks that make interview answers sound senior, plus one video that is real depth. Read the first two if time allows, and leave the third for later.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 | Bloom Filters | Week 14 | SDE-1 nice |
| 24 | Consistent Hashing | Week 14 | SDE-1 nice |
| 25 | Introduction to Big Data Tools | After the offer | SDE-2 later |
After this module you can explain how a Bloom filter avoids a disk read, and how consistent hashing keeps a cache cluster stable when a node leaves.
The four designs to do first (videos 26 to 28 and 32)
These four are the SDE-1 case studies. Do them in this order, one per week, starting in week 26. Each one should take one sitting plus one redraw from memory.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 26 | Design Ecommerce Product Listing | Week 22 | SDE-1 must |
| 27 | Designing API Rate Limiter | Week 22 | SDE-1 must |
| 28 | Designing _ Scaling Notifications | Week 23 | SDE-1 must |
| 32 | Designing URL Shortner | Week 24 | SDE-1 must |
After this module you can run the full loop out loud on a new prompt: requirements, API, data model, bottlenecks, then trade-offs.
Designs worth a pass (videos 29 to 31)
Do these if the four above felt comfortable. They add feeds and ranking, which show up in product company loops.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | Designing Realtime Abuse Master | Week 27 | SDE-1 nice |
| 30 | Designing Tinder Feed | Week 28 | SDE-1 nice |
| 31 | Desigining Twitter Trends | Week 29 | SDE-1 nice |
After this module you can sketch a fan-out feed and explain how a hot-key counter becomes a ranking problem.
Designs for later (videos 33 to 36)
Leave these until the must-do designs are solid, and treat the last three as SDE-2 reading. They are good interview stories, not required answers.
| # | Video | When | Level |
|---|---|---|---|
| 33 | Designing GitHub Gists and PasteBin | Week 25 | SDE-1 nice |
| 34 | Designing a Fraud Detection system | Week 30 | SDE-2 later |
| 35 | Designing a Recommendation Engine | Week 31 | SDE-2 later |
| 36 | Designing a Web Crawler | Week 32 | SDE-2 later |
After this module you can explain when a design needs offline processing, and why a crawler's hard part is politeness rather than fetching.
What to do with a finished video
One page of notes per video, no more. The page has a diagram at the top and three bullet lines below it. File the page under the week number so revision in week 30 is a matter of rereading your own diagrams.
If a video does not click, move on and come back after the matching project milestone. Several of these ideas only make sense once you have hit the problem yourself.
Common mistakes
- Watch in playlist order, one module at a time.
- Redraw the diagram before starting the next video.
- Skip the SDE-2 rows without guilt.
- Pair each video with the project work it explains.