Our Mission
We teach engineers, data scientists, and bootcamp graduates the 7 universal building blocks that power every system—Instagram, Netflix, Uber, Slack. After this course, you'll answer "Design Instagram" systematically instead of freezing.
AI agents can implement anything. But they need you to make the architectural decisions. This course teaches you to command AI with precision—not vague hopes.
Who This Course Is For
Junior Engineer
"Understand the architecture, not just the features."
You write features but can't explain how the system fits together. When someone asks "why did you use a queue here?" you don't have a clear answer.
Vibe Coder
"Know why it works, not just that it works."
You ship fast with AI tools but don't understand what was built. When it breaks in production, you're stuck debugging code you can't explain.
Career Changer
"Bridge the gap from coding to production systems."
You can code but haven't worked on production systems. You know syntax but not how real applications are put together at scale.
Why We Created This Course Series
Traditional engineering education takes 3-5 years to develop system thinking through experience. But AI changed the timeline—teams now expect architectural thinking much earlier in careers.
We distilled decades of system design experience into a framework that accelerates this transformation. Instead of learning specific technologies that become obsolete, you master universal interface patterns that remain constant across all platforms and technologies.
The Building Blocks Approach
Every system you've ever used—Instagram, Gmail, Uber, Netflix—is composed from the same 7 building blocks:
Task Blocks
Service - Request/response processing
Worker - Background processing
Storage Blocks
Key-Value Store - Caching and fast lookups
File Store - Media and large file storage
Queue - Message processing
Relational Database - Structured data
Vector Database - AI & similarity search
Plus 3 external entities that interact with these building blocks to create complete systems:
User
Time
External Service
About Your Instructor
Kay Ashaolu
UC Berkeley Lecturer & Engineering Manager
Kay brings a rare combination: 20+ years building commercial software at scale and 10+ years teaching at the university level. Most practitioners can't teach. Most teachers haven't built. Kay has done both.
He earned his Master's degree in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley and has built his career around empowering engineers to think architecturally—across academia, government, and industries including social media, health care, and finance.
Through years of teaching and mentoring, Kay distilled complex system design into the 7 universal building blocks that work across every platform. This course series represents his proven framework for developing architectural expertise—the same framework he teaches at UC Berkeley.