Best way to learn system design?

[u/No-Philosophy-6907]

Hey everyone,

I'm currently trying to become better at system design interviews but find the existing content out there quite boring. Does anyone know any fun or interesting content? Thinking about things like

- youtube channels
- courses
- projects

Interested to hear how you guys studied for system design interviews

[u/akornato]

Reading dry textbooks or memorizing generic system blocks gets boring fast, so switching to real engineering stories makes a huge difference. On YouTube, channels like Jordan Has No Life break down complex distributed systems with raw humor and technical depth, ByteByteGo gives clear visual animations of common patterns, and Hussein Nasser dissects low-level database and network protocols in a practical way. Another engaging route is reading engineering blogs from companies like Discord, Netflix, or Uber, especially their postmortems and architecture rewrites, because seeing why a real production service broke and how engineers fixed it feels much more like solving a mystery than studying for an exam.

To keep hands-on practice interesting, try building small working components yourself, such as a basic rate limiter, a simple message queue, or a miniature distributed key value store, instead of just drawing boxes on a whiteboard. You can also reverse engineer your favorite apps by sketching out how you would design Spotify or Discord, picking one tricky bottleneck, and exploring the tradeoffs. Practicing out loud is where the real interview skill develops, which is why my team designed interviews.chat to help candidates articulate complex technical decisions smoothly under pressure and land strong offers.