The Desi Architect

Diwali offer ends tomorrow night 🪔

Quick reminder, friends. The Diwali 50% off on every pass closes tomorrow, 12 Nov, at 11:59 PM IST. After that, prices go back to normal.

I keep getting the same message from engineers: “I will start system design after the festival rush.” But the rush never ends, and the cost of waiting is just more months of nodding in design discussions.

If you are deciding, here is what you get inside:

- The 20-week system design path. Lessons in simple English, built on desi examples like UPI, IRCTC tatkal and Hotstar during a match, with a quiz after every lesson.

- System Design Notes and case files. Read how a payment gateway, a rate limiter or an inventory system is actually designed, with the tradeoffs spelled out.

- Docker and Kubernetes labs. Break things on your own laptop and see what happens.

- Interview Vault. Drills for tech leads and staff-level interviews, built from real production situations.

- Incident Arena. A production incident simulator, so you practise the 3 AM call before it happens.

Every topic ends with one question: what did you give up by choosing this design? That is what interviewers and your own team will ask you.

Start with one lesson today, even if you do not buy anything. If it clicks, grab the pass while the 50% is on.

👉 Offer link: desiarchitect.com/

Reply below and tell me which topic you are stuck on. I will point you to the right lesson.

5 hours ago | [YT] | 3

The Desi Architect

🪔 Shubh Deepavali from The Desi Architect!


This year, may your
❤️ health have 99.99% uptime
💰 wealth scale horizontally
🏠 family always stay in sync
😊 happiness have zero downtime

Thank you for your love, support, likes and comments 🙏

Happy Diwali to you and your family! ✨

3 days ago | [YT] | 11

The Desi Architect

Many of you have asked me in comments: "System design kahan se structured tarike se seekhein?"

So I built it. desiarchitect.com/ is now live with everything in one place:

🎯 Interview Vault: 232 senior-level drills built from real production failures. Each one has a 60–90 sec pitch, where it breaks, and what you give up.
📚 System Design HLD + LLD: 131 lessons, each with a quiz and tradeoffs.
🤖 AI Engineering: 68 lessons on RAG, agents, MCP, evals and cost.
🐳 75 Docker labs you run on your own laptop: Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Nginx, Toxiproxy.
🧩 DSA for Interviews: 12 patterns and 58 worked problems, taught pattern first.

Free to start:
🗺️ 90-Day Roadmap to switch to a product company
📝 29 free System Design Notes
🚦 Traffic Sandbox and DSA Quest, right in your browser

🎁 Diwali offer: 50% OFF every pass
System Design + LLD: ₹499 → ₹250
All-Access: ₹1,299 → ₹650
90-Day Complete Plan: ₹1,199 → ₹600
Auto-applied at checkout. No coupon code. One-time payment, nothing renews.

Want live guidance? The Dec batch of the Architect Cohort is open for waitlist (8 weekends, Hindi/Hinglish)

👉 desiarchitect.com

Comment below: what are you preparing for right now? Interviews, an architect role, or AI engineering? I'll make my next videos around your answers.

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 8

The Desi Architect

I’m planning a FREE AI Engineering series where we’ll learn by building a demo application called Tadka.

We’ll cover LLMs, AI agents, RAG, testing, security, and deployment through code and practical examples.

Should I start this series?

Watch this Short and comment BUILD if you’re interested 👇

youtube.com/shorts/wFlb3PfwwdU

If there’s a good response, I’ll publish the first video next week. 🚀

1 month ago | [YT] | 3

The Desi Architect

🚨 The Sharding Demo is LIVE!

What happens when you add just 1 more database shard?

Everything looks fine… until a perfectly valid order suddenly returns 0 rows. 😳

In this live PostgreSQL demo, I:

Start with 4 shards

Add a 5th shard

Break the routing

See 79.9% of keys reshuffle

Fix it with Consistent Hashing

Actually migrate the affected data


No just diagrams. We break it, measure it, and fix it.

🎥 Watch the full demo:
https://youtu.be/A920mThmkCM

💬 Comment “Paper to Production” if you want more practical system design demos like this.

1 month ago | [YT] | 25

The Desi Architect

🤖 8 AI Concepts Every Engineer Should Know

If you're a backend developer or software engineer getting into AI, these are the concepts you should understand first 👇

1️⃣ LLM
The model that understands and generates text.

2️⃣ RAG
How you connect an LLM with your own data.

3️⃣ Embeddings
How text gets converted into vectors that capture meaning.

4️⃣ Tokens
How AI models process text, and why tokens affect cost, limits and latency.

5️⃣ AI Agents
AI systems that can plan, use tools and take actions.

6️⃣ Prompt, Context & Parameters
The building blocks that shape an LLM request and its response.

7️⃣ AI Tools & Ecosystem
Models, vector databases, APIs, frameworks, evaluation and observability.

8️⃣ MCP
A standard way for AI applications to discover and interact with tools and data.

📌 Save these 8 images.

These are the building blocks you will keep coming across when building real-world AI applications.

And if you're a backend engineer wondering how your existing skills translate to AI, start here:

🎯 Backend Dev? You're Already 70% AI Engineer

A roadmap showing how your existing backend, APIs, databases and system design knowledge connects to AI engineering.

[Watch the roadmap video](https://youtu.be/BxpTEjklgo8)

Then go one level deeper:

⚙️ REST vs Function Calling vs MCP: What Changes When AI Touches Your Backend?

What actually changes when an AI system starts interacting with your APIs and backend systems?

[Watch the REST vs Function Calling vs MCP video](https://youtu.be/VpHbxLo47QM)

AI engineering is not just about learning prompts.

Your backend fundamentals still matter.

Now it's about understanding how LLMs + data + tools + APIs + systems come together.

Which of these 8 concepts should I explain with a real production example next? 👇

Skip the Carousel

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1 month ago | [YT] | 51

The Desi Architect

🚨 Sharding Part 2 is coming very soon.

But before we break things in a real PostgreSQL setup, make sure your Part 1 theory is fresh. 😄

We covered the fundamentals you’ll need to understand the practical demo:

Shard Key → Hashing → Consistent Hashing

Because in Part 2, we’re taking this from diagrams to a real Postgres setup and seeing what actually happens when you add a new shard.

There’s going to be a failure.

An unexpected MISS.

And then we’ll fix it.

👉 Watch / revise Part 1 here:
https://youtu.be/7AmI28FPTz0

Part 2: Practical Sharding Demo, coming very soon.

If you haven't watched Part 1 yet, now is the time. 👀

#SystemDesign #Sharding #PostgreSQL #SoftwareArchitecture #DesiArchitect

1 month ago | [YT] | 12

The Desi Architect

A small preview of what paid community members get with every video.

If you have not watched Part 1 of the MCP vs API series yet, watch it here first:
https://youtu.be/VpHbxLo47QM

Every video on this channel gets a companion document. It is not a transcript and it is not a summary of the video.
It is a written guide that goes deeper than a 15 minute video can, plus working code you can actually copy into your own project.

Here is a preview of what that document looks like for this one:
drive.google.com/file/d/1z33J97dlUlTiBfiQs9gy9q_Jp…

It is a 23 page guide called "API, Function Calling and MCP". Here is what is inside:

- The one idea that actually explains the difference between the three, instead of three definitions that all sound the same
- A simple 3 question framework to decide which one your project needs, worked through step by step on a real example
- A trade off table comparing all three on coupling, latency, security, cost and how hard each one is to debug
- Five failure modes that show up after you ship, not during the demo, including the full explanation of the exact bug from the video
- Sample code for all three patterns in Java, .NET and Node, so you can see how this actually looks in the stack you use
- A short checklist you can run against your own system before you ship any of this

This is the level of detail every paid community member gets with every video.

If this is useful to you, you can press the JOIN button and join the community.

1 month ago | [YT] | 5