Individual skill
system-design
Design scalable distributed systems using structured approaches for load balancing, caching, database scaling, and message queues. Use when the user mentions "system design", "scale this", "high availability", "rate limiter", "design a URL shortener", "design Twitter", "design Uber", "design a news feed", "system design interview", "capacity planning", or "distributed architecture". Also trigger when estimating infrastructure requirements, choosing between microservices and monoliths, or designing for millions of concurrent users. Covers common system designs (TinyURL, feeds, chat) and back-of-the-envelope estimation. For data fundamentals, see ddia-systems. For resilience, see release-it.
system-design/SKILL.md
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SKILL.mdcore · 16,051 bytesSKILL.mdcore · 16,051 bytesreferences/building-blocks.mddoc · 11,730 bytesreferences/common-designs.mddoc · 12,139 bytesreferences/database-scaling.mddoc · 11,386 bytesreferences/estimation-numbers.mddoc · 8,617 bytesreferences/four-step-process.mddoc · 10,151 bytesreferences/reliability-operations.mddoc · 13,914 bytes
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# System Design Framework
A structured approach to designing large-scale distributed systems. Apply these principles when architecting new services, reviewing designs, estimating capacity, or preparing for system design discussions.
## Core Principle
**Start with requirements, not solutions.** Jumping to architecture before understanding constraints produces over- or under-engineered systems. Scalable systems are assembled from well-understood building blocks (load balancers, caches, queues, databases, CDNs) — the skill lies in choosing the right blocks, sizing them with estimates, and owning the tradeoffs each choice introduces.
## Scoring
**Goal: 10/10.** Score a design by how many of the eight Quick Diagnostic rows it satisfies — `score = round(passed / 8 × 10)`: 9-10 = all/nearly all rows pass — explicit requirements, real estimates, redundancy, a stated DB-scaling and caching strategy, async via queues, monitoring, and a deployment plan, with tradeoffs named; 5-6 = the design works but skips estimation, redundancy, or operations; <=3 = architecture proposed before requirements or estimates exist. Always state the current score, name the failing diagnostic rows, and give the specific fix for each.
## The System Design Framework
