Ask HN: What is best way to do hands-on practice for system design?
You get hands on experience at a place1. That has a functioning appAND2. Business is growing rapidly bringing more customers than the system can handle.In other words you learn on the job by getting your hands burnt. I got lucky to have joined such a startup. Learnt a lot, from fixing DB queries, designing asynchronous order processor, using CDN etc. I worked on scaling up the full stack including stuff like connection pools.So your best bet is to join such a startup. You will learn a lot by handling real user traffic. And also scaling isn’t homogeneous. For example, you make different trade offs scaling a search application Vs scaling a payment processor. So business use case and business domain does matter.