Solid curation of resources here. The progression from company blogs to personal newsletters to books creates a natural learning path that matches how most ppl actually level up. One thing I'd add is that Martin Kleppmann's DDIA is probly the single best investment for understanding trade-offs in distributed systems, but it's dense, so pairing it with ByteByteGo's visual breakdowns makes the concepts way more digestible. The recommendation to read a chapter after coding each day is spot-on, that's when abstract patterns click becuase you've just hit the problem they solve.
Framing system design through real-world engineering blogs makes the learning curve far less abstract and far more practical. This is a valuable guide for anyone building intuition beyond theory.
You asked, "How do you learn system design without getting overwhelmed?" The key is what you've just modelled: treat it as an ongoing conversation with the community, not a solo study session. A study from GitHub’s Octoverse report (2025) showed developers who followed technical blogs and open-source project threads were 3.4× more likely to retain new architectural concepts over time.
Solid curation of resources here. The progression from company blogs to personal newsletters to books creates a natural learning path that matches how most ppl actually level up. One thing I'd add is that Martin Kleppmann's DDIA is probly the single best investment for understanding trade-offs in distributed systems, but it's dense, so pairing it with ByteByteGo's visual breakdowns makes the concepts way more digestible. The recommendation to read a chapter after coding each day is spot-on, that's when abstract patterns click becuase you've just hit the problem they solve.
Real world case studies beat abstract theory every time. Thanks for putting this together!
Learning sticks faster when examples come from real systems.
Thanks for the solid compilation and shoutout, Jakub!
Framing system design through real-world engineering blogs makes the learning curve far less abstract and far more practical. This is a valuable guide for anyone building intuition beyond theory.
You asked, "How do you learn system design without getting overwhelmed?" The key is what you've just modelled: treat it as an ongoing conversation with the community, not a solo study session. A study from GitHub’s Octoverse report (2025) showed developers who followed technical blogs and open-source project threads were 3.4× more likely to retain new architectural concepts over time.