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Personal curriculum · 100 days

System design, taught through your own projects

Every odd day teaches one system-design concept cluster and immediately grounds it in Zoth, Traverse, and SentialCore — the decisions you made, the ones you rejected, and the interview answer for each. Every even day goes deep into the projects themselves: the IGA/JIT domain, the code you actually wrote, the resume claims you have to defend.

Start Day 1
0 / 100 days completed·0%
Odd days · 1, 3, 5 …

System design concept

Load balancers, consistent hashing, MVCC, outbox pattern, FSRS, sketches, PACELC — the full topic map, each with a section on exactly how it shows up (or was deliberately skipped) in your repos, with file paths and constants from your real code.

Even days · 2, 4, 6 …

Your project, deep

IGA, PAM, Zero Trust, SSO/SCIM, the 6-state JIT workflow, the RAG advisory layer, multi-tenant isolation, FSRS scheduling, notifications, PITR — plus drills that map every resume bullet to evidence, numbers, and honest weaknesses.

The 100-day map

Module 01 · Days 1–14

Foundations & Your Two Systems

14 days
0/14
D1 Requirements clarification & non-functional requirementsD2 What is Zoth? IGA, JIT, and the problem your project actually solvesD3 Back-of-the-envelope capacity planning
+ 11 more days
Module 02 · Days 15–24

APIs & the Request Path

10 days
0/10
D15 API design contracts — REST done deliberatelyD16 Zoth's API surface — routes, DTOs, and generated docsD17 HTTP internals, gRPC, and TCP vs UDP
+ 7 more days
Module 03 · Days 25–42

Data Modeling, SQL & Multi-Tenancy

18 days
0/18
D25 Relational database design — your schemas as the case studyD26 Zoth schema tour — tables, cascades, and audit-grade thinkingD27 Database indexing — B-trees, composite order, partial indexes
+ 15 more days
Module 04 · Days 43–52

Caching & Distributed Coordination

10 days
0/10
D43 Caching layers, eviction, and TTL semanticsD44 Traverse's CacheService — keys, TTLs, and invalidation wiringD45 Cache availability, concurrency, and database fallback
+ 7 more days
Module 05 · Days 53–58

Storage Engines & Object Storage

6 days
0/6
D53 Storage engines — B-trees vs LSM-trees, WAL, memtables, SSTablesD54 What Postgres gives you for free — the interview versionD55 Log-structured storage, immutability, and append-only design
+ 3 more days
Module 06 · Days 59–64

Async Work, Queues & Streams

6 days
0/6
D59 Task queue vs event stream — RabbitMQ vs Kafka vs BullMQD60 RabbitMQ in zoth — the complete topology, verifiedD61 Queue lag, schedulers, and Postgres SKIP LOCKED work queues
+ 3 more days
Module 07 · Days 65–78

Search, Analytics, Realtime & Social

14 days
0/14
D65 Information retrieval — inverted indexes, TF-IDF, BM25D66 Zoth's RAG retrieval — pgvector, HNSW, and the chunking gapD67 Query understanding, hybrid retrieval, autocomplete, spell correction
+ 11 more days
Module 08 · Days 79–82

Media, Files & CDN

4 days
0/4
D79 Media and files — direct-to-storage upload, image pipelines, CDNsD80 The career-application upload flow and the recon streamerD81 Video, transcoding, DRM, and the CDN decider
+ 1 more days
Module 09 · Days 83–90

Reliability, Security & Operations

8 days
0/8
D83 Observability, SLOs, and error budgetsD84 Your OTel stacks and the MTTD storyD85 Deployment and migration safety — expand/contract, read drain
+ 5 more days
Module 10 · Days 91–100

Synthesis & Interview Drills

10 days
0/10
D91 Synthesis — design Zoth from scratch, coldD92 Zoth rapid-fire — 25 questions, answer outlinesD93 Synthesis — design Traverse from scratch, cold
+ 7 more days