Gaurav Sen System Design !exclusive! Jun 2026

Gaurav Sen's foray into system design education is rooted in his own experience as a software engineer. Starting to learn system design in 2017, he found the available learning resources to be scattered, making the subject difficult for new engineers to grasp. To master the topic himself, he would pick a concept, like consistent hashing, open about 20 tabs, and follow links like a mini web crawler. After a month of this, he felt confident enough to make his first YouTube video on load balancing.

: The server holds the request open until new data is available.

Because cache memory (RAM) is expensive and limited, systems must decide which data to throw away when the cache is full. Common policies include: gaurav sen system design

: The application checks the cache. If it's a miss, it queries the database, returns the data to the user, and updates the cache. Database Sharding and Partitioning

The application looks for data in the cache. If it's a miss, it fetches it from the DB, stores it in the cache, and returns it. Database Sharding and Partitioning Gaurav Sen's foray into system design education is

Gaurav argues that most engineers fail the system design interview because they jump straight to HLD without understanding the data flow. His mantra is simple: Define the API, define the data model, then scale.

Design the "Big Four" using his walkthroughs: After a month of this, he felt confident

He advocates for services that do one thing well.

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His Instagram reels and YouTube videos often discuss recent industry trends, such as integrating AI into system architectures. How to Prepare for System Design Using His Material

A fan favorite. Here, Sen moves beyond simple request-response to and Long Polling . He addresses the "Last Seen" timestamp problem and how to handle presence detection across millions of concurrent connections. He famously contrasts REST APIs (Stateless) with WebSocket Servers (Stateful) and explains how to scale the latter using Redis Pub/Sub.