Day 60 posts: LinkedIn and X

The last one. The angle is the honest, earned reflection: what 60 days actually gave you, and that it is a base camp, not a summit. Swap in your own voice, and link your own repo and capstone.

Day 60 of 60 days of system design. Done.

Sixty days ago I called myself a complete beginner, and I meant it. Today I presented a system I designed, built, broke under load, and wrote up, out loud, in 20 minutes, backed by numbers I measured myself. That is the difference two months of doing the work makes.

Let me be honest about what this is and is not. I did not master distributed systems in 60 days. Nobody does, and anyone who tells you two months did is selling a course. What I have is a method, and it turns out the method is the whole thing:

Measure before you guess. I predicted a number, measured it, and learned from the gap, 60 times. How slow a disk really is. How a cache actually behaves. Exactly where my own service falls over. The gap between the guess and the number taught me what no video could.

Know the real numbers. Memory is nanoseconds, disk microseconds, network milliseconds. Watch p99, not the average, because the average hides the tail where the pain lives.

Design the failure path on purpose. The happy path is the easy 20 percent. Observability, limits, isolation and cost are the other 80, and they are what separate a diagram from a system you can run.

Explain it clearly, backed by numbers, not hope.

My capstone, the labs, and the measured results are all in the repo. It is a portfolio: it shows I did the work, not just watched it.

This is base camp, not the summit. The hard, interesting climbing is still ahead, and now I have the method to attempt it. Next: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, a mock a week, and the next slice of my capstone.

Thank you to everyone who followed along and pushed back in the comments. That made it better. Keep building, keep measuring, keep sharing what you learn.

Repo: github.com/anurag629/system-design-60-days

#systemdesign #learninginpublic #softwareengineering

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Day 60 of 60 days of system design. Done.

60 days ago I was a complete beginner. Today I presented a system I designed, built, broke under load, and wrote up, out loud, backed by numbers I measured.

That’s what doing the work does.

Honest take: I did NOT master distributed systems in 60 days. Nobody does.

What I have is a method, and the method is the whole thing.

Measure before you guess. Predict a number, measure it, learn from the gap. 60 times. How slow a disk is, how a cache behaves, where my own service breaks.

The gap taught me what no video could.

Know the real numbers: memory ns, disk µs, network ms. Watch p99, not the average.

Design the failure path on purpose: the happy path is the easy 20%, production is the other 80.

Explain it backed by numbers, not hope.

The repo is a portfolio: labs, measured results, a capstone built and broken and written up. It shows I did the work, not just watched it.

This is base camp, not the summit. The good climbing is ahead, and now I have the method.

Next: DDIA, a mock a week, the next slice of my capstone.

Thanks to everyone who followed along. Keep building, keep measuring.

Repo: github.com/anurag629/system-design-60-days