- Snowflake – Architecture: Storage, Compute and Cloud Services
The three layers, and why every cost and performance decision later in this track comes back to them. Micro-partitions and how they replace the indexes you are used to, why two teams can query the same table at full speed without blocking each other, and what the services layer does for free — including the result cache that makes a repeated query cost nothing at all.
- Snowflake – What It Is and Why It Exists
Start here. What Snowflake actually is — a SQL data warehouse you rent by the second, on somebody else's cloud — and what problem it was built to solve that Postgres and Hadoop did not. What you get on day one, what you pay for, when it is the wrong tool, and the lesson index for this track in reading order.
- LeetCode 7 – Reverse Integer
Tagged Easy, and it is not quite. Reversing the digits takes four lines; the problem is detecting 32-bit overflow without being allowed a 64-bit type. Two ways to check — undo the step, or rearrange the inequality — plus why Java's truncating % carries the sign for free, why Math.abs breaks on Integer.MIN_VALUE, and why Python needs the opposite care because its integers never overflow.
- System Design Basics – The Parts of a Production System
Every box on the whiteboard, named and justified: DNS, CDN, load balancer, a stateless web tier, cache, primary and replica databases, a message queue, object storage, and the logging and metrics that tell you which one is broken. Built up from a single server to a system that survives real traffic, with the reason each part gets added at the point it stops being optional — plus where a monolith is still the right answer.
- LeetCode 5 – Longest Palindromic Substring
Counting substrings is O(n³) and the DP table costs O(n²) memory. Neither is the answer you want: a string has only 2n − 1 centres, and expanding around each one is O(n²) time in O(1) space and about fifteen lines. The even-length centre everyone forgets, the hi − lo − 1 off-by-one, the interval DP for when you need it, and where Manacher's linear algorithm fits.