SWE Pocketbook: System Design

System design, coding interview prep and your career path in one pocket-sized, interactive book, written for working software engineers.

A FEW MINUTES A DAY
• Today's session starts with a short review warm-up, then the next five-minute part of your chapter
• Questions you missed come back on a spaced-review schedule, at most 15 a day, weakest first
• Set a learning plan, such as after standup or at lunch, with an optional reminder
• At the end of a chapter, pick one thing to try at work. A few days later the app asks how it went
• Quick checks inside every chapter, a daily question, and 639 quiz questions with explanations
• Already know a chapter? Test out of it

EASY TO START, EASY TO FINISH
• Every chapter opens with what you'll be able to do, and every section with its key idea
• Short parts end at natural pause points, so you always know how far it is to the next break
• Time estimates learn your own reading pace

LEARN BY DOING
• 71 interactive labs, each a guided experiment: predict what happens, try it, then see why. Find the hot path in a flame graph, ship a canary, watch a retry storm take down a service, move keys around a hash ring, replay incidents against burn-rate alerts
• Daily lab challenges join your spaced review, so you keep testing the ideas, not just reading them
• Step-through visualizers for data structures and algorithms: four sorting algorithms, heaps, union-find, linked lists, BFS and DFS, Dijkstra, topological sort, dynamic programming

THE WHOLE CAREER PATH
• Choose your path after Senior: individual contributor (Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, Distinguished) or manager (Engineering Manager, Senior Manager, Director, VP). The book follows the path you pick, and you can switch anytime
• What each level expects, from aspiring engineer to junior, mid-level and senior
• A quick self-check across five skills shows where you are and what to practice next
• Onboarding, code reviews, design docs, RFCs and ADRs, promotion cases, incidents and on-call, feedback and performance, org design, planning, pay and layoffs, behavioral interviews
• Fill-in templates for design docs, RFCs, ADRs, postmortems, brag docs and more

THE TECHNICAL ARSENAL
• Core CS: Big-O, data structures, sorting and searching, graphs, dynamic programming, coding patterns, concurrency, text encoding
• System design: design principles and patterns, refactoring legacy code, architecture patterns, security essentials, latency numbers, networking, performance, API design, caching, databases, distributed systems, disaster recovery, messaging, data pipelines, observability, the interview
• Tools: AI-assisted coding, building with LLMs, Git, testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, dependencies, the shell, Linux troubleshooting, Docker, Kubernetes, SQL, regex, HTTP

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
• No account, no ads, no tracking. No data is collected
• Works fully offline
• Export a backup of your progress anytime and import it on any device
• Every topic is backed by public sources: official docs, standards, open papers and practitioners' own writing
• Designed for accessibility: large text, screen readers, high contrast and read aloud with your device's own voices; tablet-friendly layout

FREE TO START
Six chapters and the level self-check are free. One purchase unlocks the whole book forever, including future updates.