This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by I.K
Hello everyone! This week I began my daily learning journey — diving into System Design concepts (via the roadmap.sh System Design Roadmap) and solving DSA challenges on LeetCode.
7 days straight of showing up. Here are the highlights:
System Design Concepts Covered
- Latency vs Throughput → Learned how speed (latency) and volume (throughput) trade off in system performance.
- Consistency Patterns → Strong, Weak, and Eventual — and where each makes sense (finance vs gaming vs social media).
- Availability Patterns → Redundancy, Replication, Load Balancing, Circuit Breakers, etc.
- Failover → Active-passive vs active-active setups, and why resilience always adds complexity.
Biggest Insight: System Design is about trade-offs, not absolutes. You never get high availability, high consistency, and high performance all at once.
DSA Problems Tackled
- Regular Expression Matching (hard) → Recursive approach stretched my thinking.
-
Integer
Roman Conversions → Dictionary lookups + loops made the logic clean. - Longest Common Prefix → Sorting trick was an elegant win.
Biggest Insight: For DSA, sometimes brute force teaches you the problem space — but the best solutions come from reframing (like sorting or recursion).
Week 1 Reflections
- Showed up daily despite challenges (some problems took 2–3 hours).
- Learned to balance deep dives (like regex recursion) with practical clarity (like Roman numeral conversions).
- Seeing patterns emerge between System Design and DSA: both are about trade-offs and structured problem solving.
What’s Next (Week 2 Goals)
- Push into more advanced system design topics (e.g., gRPC, DB sharding, caching strategies).
- Continue solving medium/hard LeetCode problems, but improve on timeboxing solutions.
- Start sharing shorter code insights to make posts even more practical for readers.
Let’s Connect!
That’s Week 1 in the books 
.
If you’ve been following along, I’d love to hear:
- Which System Design trade-off do you find most challenging in real projects?
- What’s your DSA strategy — brute force first or optimal-first thinking?
- Or just drop a to celebrate learning and consistency!
Your engagement helps me keep momentum, and I’d love to make Week 2 even better — for me and for everyone reading .
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by I.K