The Systems Path

The goal: be able to design a real system and then actually run it in production. Two books, back to back: System Design teaches you to make the right tradeoffs; DevOps teaches you to ship and operate what you designed.

Part 1 · Design it — System Design · First Principles

1. Foundations — latency numbers, availability math, back-of-envelope estimation, and the CAP intuition every design rests on.
2. Building blocks + Data — load balancers, caches, queues, CDNs; indexing, partitioning, replication, and SQL vs NoSQL.
3. Scaling + Distributed systems — horizontal scale, CQRS, consensus, consistency models, idempotency.
4. Case studies — put it together: design a URL shortener, news feed, chat system, YouTube, Uber, a stock exchange, and more.

Part 2 · Run it — DevOps · First Principles

5. Foundations + Linux + Containers — the DORA metrics, the process model, and what a container really is (namespaces + cgroups).
6. Orchestration + the deep Kubernetes-in-Depth track — from pods and services to the scheduler, kubelet/CRI, and admission control internals.
7. CI/CD + Observability — pipelines, GitOps (Argo CD), Jenkins, metrics/logs/traces, and SLOs/error budgets.

Where it leaves you

You can take a feature from “design it on a whiteboard” to “it’s running, observable, and deploys safely.” The two halves of being a systems engineer.