I’ve recently been spending some time improving my understanding of distributed systems.

YouTube is now the de facto way I learn new things, so that’s where I naturally started. There are definitely some great channels on YouTube (see my recommendation list below), but the vast majority of videos related to this topic on YT are quite terrible. In general, they tend to be focussed on people who are preparing for System Design interviews and not for people who simply want to learn how to build better systems. This leads to videos that are shiny and appear useful, but barely scratch the surface in terms of what you need to actually implement those concepts in practice. In fact, even if your goal is to crack a bunch of interviews, a vast majority of these videos will only help you crack a SDE-2 level interview. They lack any kind of depth or nuance necessary for senior or staff level interviews.