You’re looking to start a career in Systems Design. What hard skills do you need to succeed?

To succeed in Systems Design, you need hard skills like proficiency in programming languages (e.g., Java, Python), knowledge of databases (e.g., SQL, NoSQL), understanding of system architecture, familiarity with design patterns, and expertise in tools like UML and version control systems.

Understand different components for a given project , a single pattern does not fit to all projects , but the core aspect remains the same. First identify what all auxiliary services. Different components like db (sql or nosql), identity providers etc, this will help shape eagles eye view. Last but not the least - programming language to be used, could be a mix in case of micro service architecture. Once this is figured out (could take multiple iterations) then it's easy to build services knowing what each service exactly needs to do. Add tracing, monitoring and logging, which will help debug and make life easy. While doing this following aspects may help 1) how practical 2) efficient 3) scale to handle 4) modularity

As a system designer, you should * Have knowledge of both functional and technical sides * You have to choose different technology components according to the requirement and not just because it's fancy. * You should be able to think from customer's perspective and define requirements, NFRs etc accordingly * Should have knowledge of common system design components like caches, searching, databases, CDNs, cloud etc.

In Systems design you need to learn programming languages like C#, Python, Java. You also need to understand how some infrastructure work like caching infrastructure, databases, queues. This way, you can understand which infrastructure is best for the system you want to design.

As a Systems Engineer, and for you to thrive, you have to sharpen your skills with programming languages like Java, Python and C++. Secondly, you have to understand databases like SQL or NoSQL. Thirdly, you have to understand how data travels in different components. Additionally, you have to have a good grasp of structures, algorithms, and how to automate system processing using tools like Ansible, Puppet, etc All these will help you in designing optimal systems.

Data, Structures and Algorithms are the most important point of any system design. Briefly, why ? Because everythink exists or we do in our life means data, but data means nothing without a logic structure and without math algorithms cannot become eventually a model of any system. A model possibly usable to simulate and predict any output of a system to any input.

Software engineering principles encompass best practices guiding the development of robust, maintainable software. These principles include modularity, encapsulation, inheritance, and testing, among others. By adhering to these principles, you ensure your system's maintainability, reusability, and extensibility. Furthermore, adopting suitable development methodologies like agile or waterfall can enhance project management and resource utilization, aligning with project requirements and objectives.

Software Engineer principal plays a crucial role in system design by ensuring that software systems are reliable, maintainable, designing path for testing and reusable code helps in project to define scope and timelines

Systems architecture encompasses the comprehensive blueprint of a system, delineating its components, interactions, and operational parameters. It's pivotal for meeting both functional and non-functional requisites, like usability and security. Proficiency in designing and documenting systems architecture via diverse tools and methodologies is essential. Additionally, an adept architect can discern and assess various architectural styles and patterns, such as microservices or service-oriented architectures, to suit specific project needs.

In system architecture high-level design plays a very important role in defining how the system can behave when it comes to scalability. It also needs to consider the network layer to infra and how services peers. a poor system design would impact the performance of the system and may be costly also.

A poorly designed architecture would impact performance, availability, resource requirements and in some cases even security of the whole system. It cannot be compensated for by efficient individual modules. This further demonstrates why architecture design is an absolutely beneficial skill for any system designer or developer.

Reading whitepapers on distributed systems implemented by Facebook, Microsoft, AWS, and Google is a great starting point for learning how they designed distributed systems and what type of trade-offs they had to take. Some notable examples: The Tail At Scale, MapReduce, Spanner, Fallacies of distributed computing, The Byzantine Generals Problem, DynamoDB, Monarch, Dapper, Amazon Aurora, Metastable Failures

Distributed systems comprise numerous autonomous nodes collaborating to accomplish shared objectives. Commonly utilized for intricate and large-scale challenges, they demand high availability, scalability, and fault tolerance. Proficiency in distributed systems entails grasping challenges like concurrency, synchronization, and load balancing, along with trade-offs in design and development. Familiarity with protocols and technologies such as TCP/IP, HTTP, and Kafka is also crucial for effective implementation and management.

Being aware of cloud computing concepts and services has become a necessary skill for system developers and designers. Not just knowing how to use them, but more importantly to know when and why to use them. As cloud computing has become extremely popular, many developers like to use them in their systems, however, using cloud services is not always the best option. To maneuver safely inside the current hype, it is absolutely necessary to know enough about cloud computing to decide if it fits your problem or not.

The hardest skills are integrity and patience. Integrity to stand up to pressure to deliver and stop the delivery if the quality and features are not achieved. Patience in working with teammates from peers to executives to ensure that you listen "360-degrees" to everyone and incorporate best in class advice to maximize success, revenue, profit, and quality.

The hardest skill from all, and most important one, it to learn how to express your ideas in a way that your audience will understand it and will be convince to adopt it. For this you need the following: 1. Ability to draw simple diagrams and tables that show in a very intuitive way what you want to do. 2. Ability to argue, manage and convince your stakeholders. 3. The courage and integrity to accept the feedback and admit when you have done mistakes. 4. Be accountable!