Practical, war-story-driven notes on designing and architecting real systems — not textbook theory. Written by someone who has shipped these systems in production (fintech, e-commerce, SaaS), not just studied them for interviews.
Who this is for: engineers and architects who want to go from "I can explain CAP theorem" to "I can design, secure, ship, and operate the system."
Why this exists: most system design content stops at the whiteboard. This covers the parts that come after — security, observability, SRE, cost, and what actually breaks in production.
This is a hub repo. Each topic below is (or will become) its own linked repo so you can star/fork only what you need.
| # | Repo | Status | Covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | System Design & Architecture | 🟢 Live (Wave 1) | Core concepts, database fundamentals, fintech/wealthtech/insuretech case studies, APIs & microservices, architectural patterns, interview prep |
| 02 | Cloud Architecture | 🔜 Wave 2 | AWS/GCP/Azure patterns, multi-cloud, cost architecture |
| 03 | QA, Quality Engineering & Quality Management | 🟢 Live | QA/QE process, test automation frameworks, defect & test management, reporting, log monitoring, AI-QA — SRE moved to Observability & Monitoring below |
| 04 | Observability & Monitoring | 🔜 Wave 2 | Dashboards, tracing, alerting design, SRE, SLOs, incident response, reliability engineering |
| 05 | DevSecOps | 🔜 Wave 2 | Secure CI/CD, shift-left security |
| 06 | R&D — ML, DL, AI & LLMs | 🟢 Live | ML/DL fundamentals, data science, information retrieval, NLP/LLMs, agentic AI & GenAI, prompt engineering, case studies, interview prep |
| 07 | Infosec, Pentesting & VAPT | 🟢 Live | Ethical hacking, VAPT methodology |
| 08 | Networking & OSI | 🔜 Wave 5 | Networking fundamentals for architects |
| 09 | Linux for Engineers | 🔜 Wave 5 | Systems fundamentals |
| 10 | Python / Java / TypeScript for Architects | 🔜 Wave 5 | Language-level design patterns |
| 11 | Automation — Playwright, App/Web, AI Automation | 🔜 Wave 5 | Test and workflow automation |
This repo is being built in public. Star it and follow along, or jump straight to whichever spoke is live.
Everything here is free, and stays free — that's the point. If you want deeper structured content, cohort-based workshops, or hands-on advisory for your own system:
- Newsletter: [coming soon] — deep dives that don't fit in a README
- YouTube: [youtube.com/@abhijeetbatsa] — walkthroughs of the harder case studies
- Consulting / Advisory: [https://futurestaq.com] — for teams that want this applied to their actual system, not just studied
See also: RESOURCES.md — curated books, papers, and
engineering blog posts worth your time beyond this repo.
This repo is the system design/architecture anchor. Sibling repos build out full career-prep ladders for other tracks:
Manual Tester
↓
sdet-automation-career-prep → SDET / Automation Engineer / Sr / Lead
↓
ai-test-engineering-career-prep → AI Test Engineer
rnd-ai-ml-llm— ML/DL/AI/LLM reference layer, used across the AI-adjacent reposlld-and-ood-interview-prep— OOP, design patterns, UML, concurrency, LLD interview problems; pairs directly with this repo's HLD/system design contentqa-quality-engineering-hub— the QA/QE practitioner reference (process, tooling, AI-QA); see row 03 abovesdet-automation-career-prep— manual tester → SDET/Automation Engineer → Leadai-test-engineering-career-prep[restricted access/ premium access] — SDET → AI Test Engineersde-career-prep— Software Engineer career ladder, cross-linking this repo, the LLD repo, and coding-round contentfde-career-prep[restricted access/ premium access] — Forward Deployed Engineer career prepclaude-way-of-coding— patterns for working with Claude Code, Cowork, and Skills effectively- More planned:
ai-engineer-career-prep
Found a gap, a mistake, or have a real production war story to add? PRs and issues welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
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