System Design

Overview

Good system design is not about finding the perfect architecture — it is about making deliberate choices, understanding their trade-offs, and keeping the system understandable and changeable over time. This domain covers the practices we use to make architectural decisions visible, design for scale, manage debt before it compounds, and evaluate designs before implementation begins.

Topics

• Design Review Frameworks — Structured processes for evaluating system and feature designs before implementation begins, when problems are still cheap to fix
• Architecture Decisions — How we document significant architectural choices using ADRs and design docs, so the reasoning behind the system is preserved alongside the code
• API Design Standards — Designing APIs that are intentional, consistent, and evolvable — the contracts that outlive their services
• Data Modeling & Schema Design — Principles for designing schemas that are correct at inception and safe to evolve over time, without downtime
• Scalability Patterns — Proven patterns for statelessness, caching, async processing, and database scaling — applied at the right moment, not prematurely
• Reliability Patterns — Design patterns for building systems that degrade gracefully and recover predictably under partial failure
• Security Architecture — Design-level security principles — how systems are structured to limit damage, enforce least privilege, and withstand compromise
• Tech Debt Management — How we classify, track, and systematically pay down technical debt without waiting for a cleanup sprint that never comes