Ashish Pratap Singh‘s article “System Design was HARD until I Learned these 30 Concepts” is just so well-written and intuitive that I simply had to save it as a postcard for my future self.

Some of these concepts I’ve come across directly through data science, others I have absorbed almost by osmosis over the years (!), while others I’d just heard of but didn’t really ‘get’. What I love about this article is that each new concept builds on the previous concepts so by the time you are done reading you have a strong mental map of how all the components fit together into the greater ecosystem.

While systems design is not my area of expertise, one comes across these concepts all the time in the course of building applications in data science so a good understanding of what each one is and potential implications is indispensable to working in the field and collaborating with systems designers to ensure best results.