Begin Your Journey
You stand before 1195+ pages of engineering knowledge — the collective wisdom of distributed systems, architecture, infrastructure, security, AI/ML, algorithms, and everything in between. Every page goes deep. Every page respects your intelligence. No hand-waving. No "left as an exercise for the reader."
Choose your quest.
Choose Your Destiny
"I have a system design interview — and I refuse to lose"
Time needed: 2-4 weeks (2 hours/day)
| Week | What to do | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Learn the fundamentals | Distributed Systems → CAP Theorem → Databases → Caching |
| 2 | Learn infrastructure patterns | Load Balancing → Message Queues → Rate Limiting → Circuit Breaker |
| 3 | Practice with walkthroughs | URL Shortener → Instagram → WhatsApp → Uber |
| 4 | Advanced systems | Google Docs → Zoom → Ad Platform → Stock Exchange |
40 system design interviews available — browse all
Full guide: System Design Interview Learning Path
"I have a coding interview — algorithms and data structures"
Time needed: 3-4 weeks (2 hours/day)
| Week | What to do | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foundations | Big-O & Overview → Arrays & Strings → Hash Tables → Linked Lists |
| 2 | Trees & Graphs | Trees → Graphs → Heaps → Sorting & Searching |
| 3 | Advanced patterns | Dynamic Programming → Backtracking |
| 4 | Behavioral prep | Behavioral Interviews — STAR method, negotiation, leveling |
"I want to become a better backend engineer"
Time needed: 4-6 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Databases — Storage Engines → Indexing → Replication → Sharding
- Caching — Strategies → Invalidation → Redis Patterns
- Message Queues — Kafka → Kafka Streams → Queue Selection Guide
- Architecture — SOLID → Design Patterns → Microservices → DDD
- Testing — Unit Testing → Integration Testing → Test Architecture
- Production — Deployment Strategies → Monitoring → Incident Response
Full guide: Backend Engineer Learning Path
"I want to learn DevOps / SRE / Platform Engineering"
Time needed: 3-4 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Containers — Docker → Internals → Multi-stage Builds → Security
- Orchestration — Kubernetes → Helm → GitOps (ArgoCD & Flux) → Production Checklist
- IaC — Terraform → Modules → AWS Stack
- CI/CD — GitHub Actions → Pipeline Patterns → Security Scanning
- SRE — SRE Overview → SLI/SLO/SLA → Error Budgets → Capacity Planning
- Observability — Observability → Prometheus → Alerting → Disaster Recovery
Full guides: DevOps Learning Path · Platform Engineer Learning Path
"I want to learn AI/ML engineering"
Time needed: 2-3 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Foundations — AI/ML Overview → Embeddings → Vector Databases
- LLM Integration — LLM Integration Patterns → RAG Architecture
- Agents — AI Agents Architecture
- Production — ML Pipelines & MLOps
Full guide: AI/ML Engineer Learning Path
"I want to learn security"
Time needed: 2-3 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Foundations — OWASP Top 10 (read all 10)
- Auth — JWT → OAuth2 → Session Management
- Authorization — RBAC vs ABAC vs ReBAC → Google Zanzibar → Policy Engines
- Crypto — Symmetric vs Asymmetric → Hashing → Key Management
- Compliance — GDPR Engineering → SOC 2 → PCI DSS
- Zero Trust — Principles → Network Segmentation → Least Privilege
Full guide: Security Engineer Learning Path
"I want to learn frontend engineering"
Time needed: 2-3 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Rendering — Browser Rendering Pipeline → SSR vs SSG vs ISR
- Performance — Core Web Vitals → Bundle Optimization
- Architecture — State Management → Micro-Frontends
- Deep Dives — React Internals → WebAssembly
Full guide: Full-Stack Engineer Learning Path
"I want to master Spring Boot"
Time needed: 4-6 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Fundamentals — Overview → Core Concepts → REST API → Exception Handling
- Data — Spring Data JPA → Hibernate Tuning → Migrations
- Security — Spring Security → JWT Auth → OAuth2
- Cloud — Spring Cloud → Gateway → Resilience4j
- Messaging — Kafka → Event-Driven → Spring Batch
- Advanced — WebFlux → Modulith → Virtual Threads → Spring AI
- Production — Docker → Actuator → Deployment
"I want to build data pipelines"
Time needed: 2-3 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Collection — Pipeline Overview → Web Scraping → API Ingestion → File Formats
- Preprocessing — Pipeline Architecture → String Preprocessing → Datetime Preprocessing
- Validation — Great Expectations → Pandera → Data Contracts
- Orchestration — Airflow → Prefect → Pipeline Patterns
- Projects — E-Commerce Pipeline → Real Estate Pipeline
"I want to use Archon via MCP (AI assistant)"
Connect Archon to Claude Code, Cursor, or Claude Desktop — query 1,150+ pages without opening a browser:
bash
# Remote (no install)
claude mcp add archon --transport http https://archon-eight.vercel.app/api/mcp
# Or via npm
claude mcp add archon -- npx archon-mcp-serverFull MCP docs — 21 tools, 3 resources, 5 prompts.
"I want to master data analysis / EDA"
Time needed: 3-4 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Mindset — EDA Overview → Asking Right Questions → EDA Workflow → Common Mistakes
- Libraries — NumPy → pandas Fundamentals → pandas Advanced
- Cleaning — Missing Data → Outliers → Edge Cases
- Analysis — Univariate → Bivariate → Multivariate → Correlation Traps
- Visualization — matplotlib → seaborn → plotly → Best Practices
- Feature Engineering — Transformations → Encoding → Scaling
- Projects — Titanic → E-Commerce → Financial
- Advanced — Data Leakage → Explainability → Data Drift
"I want to become a cybersecurity engineer"
Time needed: 4-6 weeks (1 hour/day)
- Foundations — Cybersecurity Overview → Networking for Security → Secure Coding
- Web Security — OWASP Top 10 → Web App Pentesting → API Security Testing
- System Security — Linux Security → Container Security → Cloud Pentesting
- Offensive — Network Attacks → Reverse Engineering → Red Team Ops
- Defensive — Blue Team & SOC → Incident Response → Security Tools
- Certifications — Security Certification Roadmap
"I want to learn from real production incidents"
- War Room — 12 real incidents from GitHub, Cloudflare, Netflix, Facebook, CrowdStrike, Knight Capital
- Security Exploits — XZ Backdoor, Log4Shell, Heartbleed, Spectre, SolarWinds
- Company Architecture — How Uber, Figma, Shopify, Discord actually built their systems
- Debugging Playbooks — Step-by-step flowcharts for "API is slow", "memory leak", "pods restarting"
"I want to build something from scratch"
- Build Redis — RESP protocol, TCP server, GET/SET/TTL, persistence (885 lines)
- Build a Rate Limiter — Token bucket, sliding window, Redis-backed (859 lines)
- Build a Key-Value Store — LSM tree, memtable, SSTable, WAL (1,109 lines!)
- Build a Load Balancer — Round-robin, health checks, TCP proxy (861 lines)
"I just want to browse and explore"
- Knowledge Graph — visual map of all 1195+ topics and how they connect
- Browse by Tag — 3,000+ tags, filter by difficulty
- Compare Technologies — side-by-side comparison (Kafka vs RabbitMQ, Postgres vs MongoDB, etc.)
- Cheat Sheets — 22 quick reference cards
- Technology Radar — what to adopt, trial, assess, or hold
- War Room — real production incidents from top tech companies
- Debugging Playbooks — step-by-step flowcharts for common production issues
- Hit
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What's Inside
| Section | Pages | What awaits |
|---|---|---|
| System Design | 140+ | Fundamentals, patterns, distributed systems, databases, caching, queues, consensus, networking, API design, concurrency, geospatial, search, background jobs, advanced architecture, interview mastery |
| System Design Interviews | 48 | Instagram, Uber, YouTube, Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, ChatGPT, Copilot, Recommendation Engine, Fraud Detection, and 38 more |
| LLD Interviews | 15 | Parking lot, elevator, chess, library, snake & ladders, vending machine, ATM, movie booking, hotel, file system, tic-tac-toe, 30 practice problems (easy/medium/hard) |
| Algorithms & Data Structures | 20 | Arrays, trees, graphs, DP, sorting, heaps, hash tables, backtracking, greedy, bit manipulation, strings, JS/React/Node interview questions |
| Architecture Patterns | 55+ | OOP fundamentals, microservices, event-driven, CQRS, DDD, SOLID, FP, design patterns, cloud-native, multi-tenancy |
| Infrastructure | 80+ | Terraform, K8s, Docker, AWS, GCP, CI/CD, Nginx, service mesh, observability, Linux internals, storage, FinOps, platform engineering, AI infrastructure |
| Security | 100+ | OWASP, deep auth (12 pages), encryption, secrets, zero trust, API security, compliance, authorization, exploits (12 pages) |
| Cybersecurity | 22 | Complete security engineer path: pentesting, OSINT, reverse engineering, red/blue team, Active Directory, Web3, mobile, bug bounty, forensics |
| DevOps | 60+ | Monitoring, logging, alerting, deployment, incident response, SRE, Git, engineering practices, checklists, runbooks, migrations, feature flags |
| AI/ML Engineering | 25+ | LangChain (2000 lines), LangGraph (2200 lines), RAG, vector DBs, embeddings, AI agents, fine-tuning, guardrails, production AI, Claude/OpenAI/HuggingFace APIs |
| Exploratory Data Analysis | 69 | EDA mindset, data cleaning (7 pages), univariate/bivariate/multivariate, feature engineering, NumPy/pandas/matplotlib/seaborn/plotly/Streamlit, 5 projects, leakage, drift, ethics |
| Machine Learning | 30 | Math foundations, linear/logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, XGBoost/LightGBM, SVM, KNN, naive bayes, clustering, PCA, anomaly detection, time series, recommendations, SHAP/LIME — all with from-scratch code + real datasets |
| Deep Learning | 25 | Neural networks from scratch, PyTorch, CNN, RNN/LSTM, Transformers (attention math), VAE, GANs, GNNs, BERT, text generation, YOLO, U-Net, diffusion models, RL, CLIP — full math + PyTorch code |
| Frontend Engineering | 12 | Web performance, browser rendering, SSR/SSG, state management, React internals, WebAssembly, i18n, data visualization |
| Mobile Engineering | 21 | React Native, Flutter, architecture, state management, networking, databases, CI/CD, security, deep linking, animations, accessibility, payments, analytics, ASO, deployment, cross-platform comparison |
| Testing | 8 | Unit, integration, E2E, contract, property-based, TDD/BDD, test architecture |
| Performance | 35+ | Profiling, optimization, caching, database tuning, edge computing, load testing, benchmarks, compilers |
| Spring Boot | 55 | REST, JPA, Security, JWT, OAuth2, Cloud Gateway, Kafka, Batch, Integration, WebFlux, GraphQL, gRPC, Modulith, Native Image, Virtual Threads, Spring AI |
| Data Pipeline | 25 | Web scraping, API ingestion, preprocessing (strings/dates/text/images), Airflow, Prefect, Great Expectations, Pandera, 3 end-to-end projects |
| Data Engineering | 30+ | Stream processing, data modeling, pipelines, CDC, lakehouse, real-time analytics |
| Production Blueprints | 55+ | Auth, billing, notifications, rate limiter, search, chat, payments, email, scheduler, and more |
| War Room | 12 | GitHub, Cloudflare, Knight Capital, AWS S3, Facebook, GitLab, Stripe, Discord, Twitter, Netflix, CrowdStrike |
| Build From Scratch | 5 | Build Redis, rate limiter, key-value store, load balancer — full working code |
| Company Architecture | 5 | How Uber, Figma, Shopify, Discord actually built their systems |
| Debugging Playbooks | 7 | "API slow", "memory leak", "DB CPU 100%", "pods restarting", "502s", "error spike" |
| Checklists & Runbooks | 10 | Pre-launch (90 items), security review, performance review, DB failover, DDoS response |
| Learning Paths | 16 | Backend, DevOps, Frontend, Security, Interview, Data, AI/ML, Platform, Full-Stack, ML/DL, Cybersecurity, Mobile, Data Scientist, Spring Boot, Behavioral, Resources |
| Cheat Sheets | 23 | Docker, K8s, Git, SQL, TS, Linux, Redis, Terraform, Python, Go, Rust, Bash, Nginx, PromQL, AWS CLI, kubectl, Helm, GraphQL, Regex, SQL Advanced, Docker Compose, LLM APIs, pandas EDA |
| Prompt Engineering | 20+ | 500+ prompts for engineering, product, UI, and architecture |
| UI & Design Systems | 35+ | Typography, color, spacing, accessibility, dark mode, animations |
| Comparisons | 20 | React/Vue/Svelte, Next/Nuxt/SvelteKit, Express/Fastify, Prisma/Drizzle, Vite/Webpack, and 15 more |
How Each Page Is Structured
Every page follows a consistent, deep-dive format:
- Why it exists — the problem it solves
- First principles — concepts from scratch
- Core mechanics — how it works, with Mermaid diagrams
- Implementation — production code in TypeScript, Go, Python
- Edge cases — what goes wrong
- Performance — Big-O, benchmarks, KaTeX math
- Comparison tables — trade-offs and alternatives
- Production tips — warnings, danger zones, pro tips
- Cross-references — links to related Archon pages
- Further reading — papers, docs, next topics
Quick Links
| I want to... | Go to... |
|---|---|
| Prepare for system design interviews | 40 System Design Interviews |
| Prepare for coding interviews | Algorithms & Data Structures |
| Prepare for behavioral interviews | Behavioral Interviews |
| Learn a specific topic | Browse by Tag |
| Get a quick reference | 23 Cheat Sheets |
| See how topics connect | Knowledge Graph |
| Compare technologies | 20 Comparisons |
| Find AI-powered answers | Click the chat bubble (bottom-right) |
| Follow a structured path | 11 Learning Paths |
| Build a production service | 55+ Production Blueprints |
| Learn from real incidents | 13 War Room Case Studies |