| Week | Coding Concepts | System Design Topic | "Design X" Prompt | Modern Tech Focus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arrays, Strings | System Design Fundamentals + Cloud Basics | URL Shortener | AWS/GCP basics, Docker intro, REST APIs |
| 2 | Hash Map/Set, Two Pointers | Load Balancing + API Gateways | Pastebin/Notes App | Nginx, Kong, AWS ALB, Service Discovery |
| 3 | Sliding Window, Stack | Caching + CDN | Photo Sharing/Instagram Lite | Redis, CloudFront, Edge computing |
| 4 | Queue, Linked List | Message Queues + Event-Driven Architecture | Real-time Chat (Slack/Discord) | Kafka, RabbitMQ, WebSockets, Event sourcing |
| 5 | Trees (DFS/BFS) | Database Design + ACID Properties | Payment Processing System | PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Transaction isolation |
| 6 | Binary Search, Heap/PQ | Microservices + Container Orchestration | E-commerce Platform (Stripe-like) | Kubernetes, Docker, Service mesh (Istio) |
| 7 | Backtracking, Sorting | Observability + Monitoring | Video Streaming (YouTube) | Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, ELK stack |
| 8 | Dynamic Programming (1D) | Real-time Data Processing | Fraud Detection System | Apache Spark, Kafka Streams, Feature stores |
| 9 | Dynamic Programming (2D), Graphs | ML Infrastructure + Model Serving | Recommendation Engine (Netflix) | MLflow, Kubeflow, Vector DBs, A/B testing |
| 10 | Graphs, Math/Simulation | Security + Compliance | Banking Core System (Robinhood) | OAuth2, PCI DSS, Encryption, Audit logs |
| 11 | Review Weak Topics | Distributed Systems + Consensus | Crypto Exchange (Binance-like) | Raft/PBFT, High-frequency trading, Order matching |
| 12 | Mock Interview/Review | AI/LLM Systems + Serverless | ChatGPT/Claude (Conversational AI) | Lambda, GPT APIs, RAG, Vector search |
Additional Study Resources by Category:
Fintech-Specific:
AI/ML Systems:
Modern Distributed Systems: