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ashishps1/awesome-system-design-resources
Learn System Design concepts and prepare for interviews using free resources.
A link aggregator for system design interview prep — organized lists of articles, YouTube videos, and academic papers covering distributed systems fundamentals, with some toy Java/Python implementations of concepts like consistent hashing and rate limiting. It's aimed squarely at people preparing for FAANG-style interviews, not engineers trying to actually build distributed systems.
The paper list is legitimately good — Dynamo, GFS, Spanner, Kafka, Chubby, Paxos all in one place is a real time-saver. The concept organization by category (caching, databases, async comms) makes it easy to identify gaps in your knowledge. The implementations directory, though small, includes all five standard rate limiting algorithms side-by-side in both Java and Python, which is handy for comparison. The engineering blog links (Discord's message storage, Airbnb's payment idempotency) are the kind of real-world case studies that actually show how these concepts play out under production constraints.
Nearly everything here is an outbound link to the author's own paid newsletter or course platform (algomaster.io), so it's as much a marketing funnel as a resource list. The implementations are toy code — ConsistentHashing.java with no tests, no edge cases, no production considerations — more a cheat sheet than something you'd learn deep lessons from. There's nothing on consensus implementation depth (Raft is absent, Paxos only has the original paper with no approachable explainer), which is a real gap for serious study. The 'easy/medium/hard' problem categorization is arbitrary and not explained, and several 'easy' problems (distributed key-value store) are anything but.