Fake system design

One of my favorite topics that I don't get to talk about enough:

High-level system design.

This is the scientific art of how to design, build, maintain and evolve software systems beyond the scope of a single process.

But I have little patience with people who claim to study system design, without actually being able to DO system design.

Most people who take a class on system design only learn ideas and concepts. They know how to draw impressive-looking diagrams. But they develop zero ability to actually build the systems they think they are designing.

I'll be blunt: those folks have not learned system design at all.

They think they have. But their learning is so shallow, so superficial, they cannot even understand what they are missing. Until they try to actually build something, and their so-called knowledge falls apart.

With Boosted Code, you are being called to a higher standard than that.

Which is why the engineering foundations pillar includes a system design track. And with more classes on this topic planned for the future, it right now has a fully developed and frankly massive "DevOps Foundations" course module, covering the often-missing but resolutely essential foundations:

• Principles of Infrastructure-As-Code
• Virtual Machine Management
• SSH Protocol for remote system control and communication
• Running Ansible Tasks
• GitHub Deploy Keys And Setup
• Configuration and deployment of web applications on Linux
• Web Server Deployment
• Leveraging version control (Git) for controlling deployment
• Web server configuration including automatic HTTPS
• Back-end Database configuration and DB migrations
• ​GitHub Deployment Automation
• Local development strategies for Windows, macOS, and Linux
• Quality Of Life Improvements
• DevOps Task Guides
• Webserver configuration

And mucho more.

I created this DevOps Foundation module first, because it’s the low-level foundation that ALL system design depends on...

At least if you want to creating systems that can actually be implemented, and not just draw imaginary diagrams on a whiteboard.

And it sets the stage for more advanced system design topics, including:

• Architecture design
• Message queue systems
• Vertical and horizontal scalability
• Database systems, and the trade-offs of different DB architectures
• Defensive security strategies
• Microservice architectures
• Caching and cache management
• Load balancing

All of which are planned in future Boosted Code courses, in addition to the already vast curriculum.

Really, System Design is its own pillar; in addition to the rest of the engineering foundations pillar, the agentic coding pillar, and the financial security pillar of Boosted Code.

Check out everything you get here: