Introduction

Embark on an expedition into the vastness of system design with your host, Benny Kitchell, an experienced engineer whose passion for crafting scalable systems is as infectious as it is informative. Together, we'll traverse the complexities of database scaling, the subtleties of caching, and the intricacies of sharding. With foresight and expertise, I promise to arm you with the knowledge to tackle the challenges of building robust systems. As the series unfolds, anticipate engaging dialogues with the masterminds behind some of the most formidable tech architectures, offering a front-row seat to the creative and adaptable world of system design.

Step into a growing community where your thoughts and questions are the catalysts for our collective growth in mastering system design. As we unveil a Discord server, a space for unbridled discussion and growth, your input will help carve the path our conversations take. With each episode, including the upcoming one I'm thrilled to announce, we aim to enrich your understanding and spark your enthusiasm. Your journey in system design doesn't have to be a solo venture—join us, contribute, and let's elevate our skills in unison.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to System Design Podcast
• 6:25 System Design Podcast Community Building

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Honestly, this is just the first episode. I'm just going to be talking about who I am and why I'm doing this, not so much the deep stuff. So skip this episode if you want to hear more technical stuff, great. So my name is Benny Kitchell. If you've never heard of me, you were not alone in that fact. I'm just a senior engineer like many, many others, and I'm just a guy. I'm no one famous. I haven't built any big grand systems or anything of that nature. Instead, I'm just a guy who's curious, who wants to learn more about system design and talk to you guys about system design and hopefully get better at it and help others get better at it. At the end of the day, the most important part of this podcast is just to share knowledge and be the best free resource site that you can find for system design knowledge and how to scale systems properly. For the beginning part of the podcast life, I'm going to be focusing on just things that I know pretty well in terms of just scaling systems and researching other things that I may not know and get better at those things, Mostly just talking about the different points of the system, how to scale it properly, some of the roadblocks you might hit and ways to avoid them, and also just things that might make your life easier After that, once we run out of topics, in that I would like to bring on people who have built these big grand systems and talk to them and get picked their mind about how they built their systems, the roadblocks that they may have hit and, again, ways that we can get better as architects and building these systems by basically just using each other and leveraging each other's knowledge. I'm hopeful in the future that we can break more into talking about interviews and talk about what makes them so interesting. I think one of the most interesting parts about system design interviews for me is that there's no one right answer, I guess. So building a system is sort of different from engineering in the concept that it's just sort of an art and it's sort of free flowing, where it's like a lot of us engineers which some may argue that Writing code can be an art, but I would argue that you know it still has a lot of structure and system design has a lot of, you know, free-flowing parts and can make things different depending on who's building it, while still also being correct. I guess that the end goal is just building a system that's scalable and handles the load, regardless of the tools that you use. Yeah, so, starting off, I'm probably going to be talking about database scaling and sort of the different parts of databases indexes, you know, cache, the different cache concepts, and then also talking about like sharding and things like that. After that I don't really have a game plan for which thing to go into. I do have a poll up on the Patreon. That is, you know it's a dollar but you know, just to sort of give back to anyone who's donating to the Patreon. But the next couple of things we could talk about is something like encoding or messaging, cues or load balancing concepts or you know, basically any sort of strategies just to scale the system.

Speaker 1: 4:13

Whatever you guys want to listen to, I'm down for actually talking about and researching. Yeah, so more about me. I've been writing code for about a decade now. I've been a senior engineer for about five years. I have been all over the place in terms of startups and, you know, just trying to cut my teeth and learn from the people that are above me.

Speaker 1: 4:40

And yeah, I'm hoping that this podcast will sort of act as that for the people that are listening and hopefully you guys come out of this you know better engineers, better architects, or maybe you just learn a few things. That's okay with me too, so, yeah, so, off the bat, I'm going to work on creating a Discord server in the near future. It's gonna be totally free, where we can just all gather and talk about knowledge and, you know, again, be that sort of source where you know we can ask questions and not feel judgment or feel ashamed, you know, asking our higher ups or something like that, or feel stupid. I mean posture syndrome. It's a great thing. But yeah, at the end of the day, I just, you know, I want to make this a very nice free resource that is very easy to come into at an intermediate engineering level and just grow more as you listen.

Speaker 1: 5:43

Yeah, so, other than engineering, I really enjoy music, pretty much every kind of music you can think of, and yes, I mean that I mean like William Anya Bohr. Check them out if you don't know them. So, yeah, so just music from all over. And other than that, I've been getting into woodworking just to have something to do that doesn't involve my brain and instead involves my hands, and I can sort of turn my brain off and, you know, build things terribly and not, you know, pay huge consequences for it, I guess. Yeah, so, other than that, that's pretty much it.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Again, a short little intro for you guys to get to know me and get to know who I am and why I'm doing this. Yeah, at the end of the day, I just hope I can help people learn and I hope I can help myself. You know, grow and be better at designing systems overall. And even if I, you know, help one person just understand this better, or help 100 people, you know, get a promotion or get a job offer or something like that, then you know I'm going to be stoked on that. So always feel free to reach out to me learn system design pod at gmailcom If you have any questions or or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 7:09

I also have again, I mentioned before Patreon, patreoncom slash, learn system design. I'm only charging a dollar if you just want to talk or, you know, vote on what I'm going to be talking about next. Other than that, I'm going to be creating the Discord server sometime in the next few weeks and I'll also put that in the episodes and I'll announce that again. You know as many channels as I can grow and, and you know, sort of supply and have people that can join and discuss things and be better at things. That's what I'm hoping to do. Other than that, I the next episode is coming out February 27th, which is this upcoming Tuesday, and I hope you drop in and listen. I'm very excited to be doing this and I'm very excited to you know, be a part of this and, and you know, create this little community. So, that being said, many casual scaling down yeah.