Design Thinking
Design Thinking for Software Engineers
Learn how to think, design, and reason about systems like a senior engineer. Master design thinking fundamentals, problem-solving frameworks, trade-off thinking, and architecture patterns that keep systems adaptable and scalable.
What Is Design Thinking in Software Engineering?
Learn how design thinking transforms unclear product requirements into practical, reliable, and scalable system architectures. Master the skill that differentiates junior engineers from senior ones.
Structured Problem-Solving Framework: The 7-Step Approach
Master the 7-step design framework that FAANG engineers use in real design reviews. Learn to clarify requirements, identify constraints, sketch architecture, and evaluate trade-offs systematically.
Trade-Off Thinking: The Heart of Design Thinking
Great engineers don't pick technologies—they pick trade-offs. Learn how to justify architectural choices like Redis, Kafka, MongoDB, or MySQL with measurable reasoning.
Architecture Thinking: Decomposing Problems into Components
Learn how to break down vague product problems into API flows, storage layers, caching layers, queue pipelines, and background workers. This skill differentiates junior engineers from senior ones.
Real-World Design Templates
Templates help you avoid blank-page syndrome. Reusable thinking models speed up reasoning in interviews and real work.
Case Studies in Design Thinking
Learn from real-world systems: Instagram's sharded MySQL, WhatsApp's Erlang architecture, Uber's dynamic pricing, Slack's WebSocket management, and Netflix's microservices migration.
High-Level Architecture Patterns
Learn the big patterns you'll repeatedly use in real products and interviews: event-driven architecture, layered architecture, CQRS, microservices, real-time systems, and batch-processing systems.
Anti-Patterns & What Not To Do
Knowing what not to do improves your design instincts faster. Learn to avoid over-engineering, under-engineering, premature optimization, and other common mistakes.
Communication & Interview Strategy
Design thinking is useless unless you communicate it well. Learn how to speak clearly, structure thoughts, and demonstrate senior-level confidence in system design interviews.
Decision-Making Under Real Constraints
Senior engineers excel at architectural decisions under uncertainty. Learn time vs correctness vs cost trade-offs, build vs buy vs defer, and MVP vs long-term architecture.
Failure-First Design Thinking
Design for failure before scale. Learn failure modes, blast radius analysis, graceful degradation vs hard failure, and SLOs/SLIs/error budgets in system design.
Trade-offs at Scale
Beyond buzzwords: when microservices are wrong, when eventual consistency fails, and how to choose strong consistency, latency vs throughput, and read vs write amplification.
Cost-Aware Architecture
Design systems with cloud cost in mind. Over-engineering vs under-engineering, cost of reliability, and when cheaper infrastructure is the wrong choice.
Evolutionary Design
Design for change, not perfection. Migration strategies, schema evolution, backward compatibility, incremental rollouts, and feature flags. Staff-level thinking.
Ambiguity Handling & Problem Framing
How senior engineers ask clarifying questions, reframe vague problems, identify the real vs stated problem, and recognize premature optimization.
Non-Functional Requirements Deep Dive
Security vs UX trade-offs, compliance (PII, GDPR, SOC2), multi-region vs multi-AZ, and observability as part of system design. Senior interview gold.
Team & Org-Level Design Thinking
Design systems for team ownership. Conway's Law in practice, API contracts between teams, reducing cognitive load, and Amazon's two-pizza team. Staff+ signal.
Interview-Specific Senior Mistakes & Anti-Patterns
What senior candidates get wrong in system design interviews. Over-engineering, jumping to tech before clarifying, failing to justify trade-offs. How to avoid these pitfalls.
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