Course Catalog

Pick a system. Follow it from first principles to production.

These are not shallow overviews. Each course is a structured path for developers who want the full mental model, the real tradeoffs, and the behavior that shows up in production.

No paywall. No filler. No pretending the hard parts are optional.

23 full courses free forever production-first explanations

Choose your rabbit hole

A catalog for developers who learn by going too deep.

Use the search if you know what you want. Otherwise scan the catalog and follow the system that keeps pulling your attention back in.

01 80 topics · ~7h Linux & Systems Programming The OS every backend engineer lives in — processes, filesystems, networking, the kernel. linux Open course 02 60 topics · ~5h System Design Design Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp — scalable architecture from first principles. system design Open course 03 83 topics · ~7h Computer Networks From packets to firewalls — 83 topics, 15 sections, zero fluff. networking Open course 04 90 topics · ~8h Databases & Data Systems SQL, NoSQL, indexes, transactions, sharding — how data storage actually works. databases Open course 05 70 topics · ~6h DevOps & Platform Engineering CI/CD, GitOps, Terraform, Ansible — building systems that ship fast and break less. devops Open course 06 80 topics · ~7h Distributed Systems CAP theorem, consensus, Raft, Paxos, replication — the foundation of every modern system. distributed systems Open course 07 75 topics · ~6h Cloud Computing IaaS to serverless, autoscaling to multi-region — how cloud actually works under the hood. cloud computing Open course 08 85 topics · ~7h Containers & Kubernetes Docker, pods, services, ingress, Helm — container infrastructure from first principles. containers kubernetes Open course 09 55 topics · ~5h API Architecture REST, GraphQL, gRPC, API gateways, rate limiting — building APIs that scale. api architecture Open course 10 55 topics · ~5h MLOps & AI DevOps Model versioning, training pipelines, feature stores, drift detection — DevOps for AI. mlops Open course 11 55 topics · ~5h Observability & Monitoring Logging, metrics, tracing, Prometheus, Grafana — knowing what your system is doing. observability Open course 12 50 topics · ~4h Performance Engineering Latency, throughput, caching, profiling — making systems fast on purpose. performance engineering Open course 13 96 topics · ~8h Cryptography From Caesar ciphers to post-quantum — how the math actually works, where it breaks. cryptography Open course 14 159 topics · ~13h Network Security How attackers break networks and how engineers build systems that survive them. network security Open course 15 60 topics · ~5h Infrastructure Security Secrets management, IAM, threat modeling, secure architecture — security built in. infrastructure security Open course 16 65 topics · ~5h AI Infrastructure Vector databases, model serving, GPU clusters, RAG architecture — the plumbing behind AI. ai infrastructure Open course 17 50 topics · ~4h AI Security Prompt injection, model poisoning, adversarial attacks — securing AI systems. ai security Open course 18 55 topics · ~5h Reliability Engineering (SRE) SLOs, error budgets, chaos engineering, incident response — building systems that last. reliability engineering Open course 19 45 topics · ~4h Debugging Distributed Systems Packet analysis, latency diagnosis, failure analysis — finding what broke and why. debugging distributed Open course 20 55 topics · ~5h Internet Protocol Deep Dives HTTP/1.1 through HTTP/3, QUIC, WebSockets, gRPC, DNSSEC, SSH — protocols in full depth. protocol deep dives Open course 21 60 topics · ~5h Storage Systems Object storage, RAID, HDFS, Ceph, erasure coding — data durability from first principles. storage systems Open course 22 50 topics · ~4h Message Queues & Streaming Kafka, RabbitMQ, event streaming, pub/sub — asynchronous systems explained clearly. message queues Open course 23 45 topics · ~4h Edge Computing Edge networks, CDN compute, edge functions — moving compute closer to users. edge computing Open course