Foundations of System Design: Learn It the Way I Wish Someone Taught Me

When I first started learning system design, I felt overwhelmed. Load balancers. Caches. Message queues. Replication. Sharding. Distributed systems. There are a lot of terms. And most guides throw them at you like a vocabulary test. But here is the thing: I don't think the best way to learn system design is to memorize diagrams or vocabulary. I...