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