Gaurav Sen's System Design Playlist: study plan and how long it takes
The Gaurav Sen playlist is 26 videos and 6.9 hours long. Here's how long it takes at different paces, a week-by-week schedule built from the real videos, and a planner that turns it into your own daily plan.
26 videos · 6.9 hours · Gaurav Sen
Gaurav Sen's System Design playlist is a classic introduction to distributed systems for interviews: horizontal vs vertical scaling, load balancing and consistent hashing, message queues, database sharding, avoiding single points of failure, publisher-subscriber models, NoSQL, designing Tinder and WhatsApp, capacity estimation, consensus and replication, and consistency trade-offs.
It's short, at under seven hours, but dense with concepts that come up in every system design interview.
Who it's for: Software engineers preparing for system design interviews, especially those new to distributed systems.
How long does it take?
The full playlist is 6.9 hours across 26 videos. Here's roughly how many days that is at different daily watch times and speeds, counting video time only:
| Daily time | At 1x | At 1.5x | At 2x |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 min a day | 14 days | 10 days | 7 days |
| 1 h a day | 7 days | 5 days | 4 days |
| 2 h a day | 4 days | 3 days | 2 days |
Make your own schedule
The playlist link is already filled in. Press Plan, set how much time you have each day and your speed, and you'll get a day-by-day schedule with a finish date and a calendar file. It reads the live playlist, so new videos are included.
Week-by-week schedule
A sample plan at 30 minutes a day and normal speed, using whole videos so none is split across days. That's 3 weeks in total. For a different pace, start date or speed, use the planner above.
Week 1Videos 1–14 · 2h 41m
Day 1 · 17m
- 1System Design Primer ⭐️: How to start with distributed systems?9m
- 2System Design BASICS: Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling8m
Day 2 · 25m
- 3What is LOAD BALANCING? ⚖️14m
- 4What is CONSISTENT HASHING and Where is it used?11m
Day 3 · 27m
- 5What is a MESSAGE QUEUE and Where is it used?10m
- 6What is a MICROSERVICE ARCHITECTURE and what are its advantages?8m
- 7What is DATABASE SHARDING?9m
Day 4 · 24m
- 8Caching in distributed systems: A friendly introduction11m
- 9How to avoid a single point of failure in distributed systems ✅7m
- 10What is a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?6m
Day 5 · 26m
- 11What is the Publisher Subscriber Model?11m
- 12What's an Event Driven System?15m
Day 6 · 26m
- 13Introduction to NoSQL databases26m
Day 7 · 15m
- 14What is an API and how do you design it? 🗒️✅15m
Week 2Videos 15–22 · 2h 46m
Day 8 · 37m
- 15System Design: TINDER as a microservice architecture37m
Day 9 · 24m
- 16Designing INSTAGRAM: System Design of News Feed24m
Day 10 · 25m
- 17WHATSAPP System Design: Chat Messaging Systems for Interviews25m
Day 11 · 24m
- 18How NETFLIX onboards new content: Video Processing at scale 🎥11m
- 19Capacity Planning and Estimation: How much data does YouTube store daily?13m
Day 12 · 17m
- 20How databases scale writes: The power of the log ✍️🗒️17m
Day 13 · 16m
- 21Distributed Consensus and Data Replication strategies on the server16m
Day 14 · 22m
- 22Designing a location database: QuadTrees and Hilbert Curves22m
Week 3Videos 23–26 · 1h 25m
Day 15 · 26m
- 23Data Consistency and Tradeoffs in Distributed Systems26m
Day 16 · 46m
- 24System Design Interview: TikTok architecture with @sudocode46m
Day 17 · 13m
- 255 Tips for System Design Interviews8m
- 26System Design Walkthrough at InterviewReady - Designed for SDE 1 to SDE 3 Interview Preparation5m
Tips for finishing
- After each concept video, explain it out loud in two minutes as you would in an interview.
- Draw the Tinder and WhatsApp designs yourself before watching his solutions.