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6 steps6h trajectoryintermediate
Realtime and Streaming Systems
A trajectory for low-latency event systems where ordering, deduplication, and user-visible correctness are critical.
Completion0%
Target role
Engineers preparing for realtime platform and data-intensive interview loops.
Current focus
Step 1: Realtime Messaging Fundamentals
Progress mode
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Step 1CurrentadvancedPremium
Real-Time Chat & Messaging System
Design a globally distributed chat platform with low-latency delivery, offline sync, read receipts, media attachments, and strong consistency guarantees for message ordering.

Why now

Establishes delivery semantics and fanout design for user-facing realtime systems.

Skills learned

Fanout modelsDelivery guaranteesSession consistency
Step 2UpcomingadvancedPremium
Distributed Presence System (Who's Online?)
Design a globally distributed presence platform that tracks online/offline state for millions of users with low-latency fanout, privacy controls, and replay-safe reliability.

Why now

Adds soft-state design and consistency constraints under bursty connection churn.

Skills learned

Heartbeat designStaleness budgetsRegional reconciliation
Step 3UpcomingadvancedPremium
Real-Time Leaderboard with Anti-Cheat Detection
Design a real-time leaderboard system that serves millions of players with p99 rank reads under 80ms, handles 1.2M score updates/sec, and enforces explainable anti-cheat decisions.

Why now

Combines streaming writes, ranking correctness, and abuse response mechanisms.

Skills learned

Score ingestion pipelineFraud signalsLow-latency query path
Step 4UpcomingbeginnerPremium
Event Deduplication Platform for Idempotent Processing
Design a platform that removes duplicate events across distributed pipelines with low latency.

Why now

Forces precise reasoning on dedup windows, replay behavior, and storage tradeoffs.

Skills learned

Idempotency key designReplay-safe writesDedup state lifecycle
Step 5UpcomingbeginnerPremium
Event Replay Platform for Debugging Microservices
Design an event replay platform that allows developers to capture, store, and replay events from microservices for debugging and testing purposes. Enable time-travel debugging across distributed systems.

Why now

Deepens operational debugging and causality reconstruction for microservice systems.

Skills learned

Event correlationReplay sandboxingForensic observability
Step 6UpcomingintermediatePremium
Real-time Anomaly Detection Pipeline
Design a system that detects anomalies in streaming data using ML models with adaptive thresholds and explainable alerts

Why now

Completes the path with streaming analytics, drift handling, and action policy tradeoffs.

Skills learned

Online feature windowsFalse positive controlAlerting/action loops

Checkpoints

Realtime Correctness Checkpoint
Explains latency/correctness tradeoffs with concrete SLO targets.

Complete through step 3 to unlock this checkpoint.

Streaming Resilience Checkpoint
Can design replay + dedup + anomaly response loop with clear failure mitigation.

Complete through step 6 to unlock this checkpoint.