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Kay Ashaolu
Kay Ashaolu

Posted on Originally published at systemthinkinglab.ai

Understand the systems you work on

Hey,

Most systems are too big to hold in your head. Instagram is. So is the one at your job. But however large a system is, it breaks down into a small set of parts.

Course I teaches those parts: seven building blocks. Once you can see them in Instagram, you can see them in the system you work on every day, and truly understand it.

Here are two of the seven. A Queue is a line that holds work for later; a Worker is a program that takes the next job off the line and does it.

Try this today, free. Pick an app you use daily and find its parts: where it keeps things, where work waits, and what picks the work up.

By the end you can:

  • Take a design question apart into its parts before you name a single tool.
  • Move slow work, like sending the welcome email, out of the moment the user is waiting, so a slow mail server never holds up signup.
  • Choose a database or queue by what it does, then defend the trade-off out loud.
  • Open a design interview with a method instead of a guess.

It is 12 lessons, including two hands-on Python labs, a Link Shortener case study and an assessment, plus a three-part challenge. Self-paced.

Course I is where the four courses begin. It is $99 on its own, or all four courses are one $299 purchase with Course 0 included, each with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
To buy Course I: https://systemthinkinglab.ai/course-1.html
All four: https://systemthinkinglab.ai/courses-i-iv.html

Not ready yet? The free articles on the blocks are here: https://systemthinkinglab.ai/learn/

  • Kay

This note goes out by email Sunday to Friday. Read more at systemthinkinglab.ai.

If you want to see how products like Instagram and Netflix are designed, take your free 5-day course: the 7 building blocks.

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