Finally understand system design & AI engineering, one diagram at a time.
Go from junior to senior (and beyond): learn to think in systems, not snippets. Animated whiteboard-style courses from The Coding Gopher YouTube channel, with every concept built up step by step and interview prep built in.
One payment for all 9 current and coming courses. (2 courses bought separately: $238.)
- 18 modules · ~5 hours
- 7 more courses coming, included
- 30-day money-back guarantee* *Subject to our refund policy
↑ the System Design trailer, tap to unmute
Watch before you buy
Module 1 of every course is free, in full
No trial clock, no card. Watch the whole first lesson and see if the visuals click for you.
FreeSystem Design · Module 1 · ~21 min
How to Approach Any Design
A repeatable framework: requirements, estimates, APIs, high-level design, and deep dives.
FreeAI Engineering · Module 1 · ~19 min
How to Approach AI System Design
A framework for scoping, evaluating and designing LLM-powered systems.
Sound familiar?
You've watched the videos. You've read the blog posts. It still doesn't click.
- ✗You can write the code, but freeze when someone asks how the whole system fits together.
- ✗You know the buzzwords (sharding, CAP, RAG, agents) but can't explain the trade-offs.
- ✗Scattered tutorials gave you fragments, not one mental model that connects them.
- ✗LLM features are showing up everywhere, and nobody explains how to build them properly.
Live now
Two complete courses, ready today
Every concept is animated step by step, the way you'd build it up on a whiteboard.
System Design, Visually Explained
From a blank whiteboard to a design you can defend.
- 1How to Approach Any Design
- 2Clients, Servers, and APIs
- 3Scaling and Load Balancing
- 4Databases
- 5Caching and CDNs
- 6Replication and Sharding
- 7Consistency and CAP
- 8Message Queues
- 9Case Studies
AI Engineering, Visually Explained
Design production LLM systems, not demos.
- 1How to Approach AI System Design
- 2Representations and Embeddings
- 3Structured Outputs and Schema Enforcement
- 4Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- 5Agentic Workflows and Tool Calling
- 6Fine-Tuning and Customization
- 7Latency and Inference Optimization
- 8LLM Gateways, Guardrails, and LLMOps
- 9AI Case Studies
Where are you on the junior → senior path? Take a free 8-question skill check (about 2 minutes). Instant score, every answer explained, no email needed.
New: The System Design Visual Guide. An 80-page illustrated PDF with 10 classic designs on one page each. Grab the free 10-page sample.
Free sample →Coming soon
7 more courses, included in All-Access
Join a waitlist to hear when each one launches. All-Access members get them automatically.
Included with All-Access
All 7 upcoming courses, and every one after them, at no extra cost.
Lifetime: pay once and every future course unlocks automatically the day it launches. Annual: included while subscribed. Single-course purchases don't include future courses.
- Coming soon
System Design: Case Studies
Design real products end to end, the way a senior engineer would.
Planned topics
- URL shortener, from one box to global scale
- News feed: fan-out on write vs. read
- Chat and presence with WebSockets
- Ride sharing: dispatch and geo-indexing
- Payments: idempotency and exactly-once myths
- Video streaming and CDNs
- Coming soon
Backend Development
Build production backends: APIs, data, auth and the parts tutorials skip.
Planned topics
- API design: REST vs. gRPC, pagination, versioning
- Databases in practice: transactions, migrations, N+1
- Auth: sessions, JWTs and OAuth, step by step
- Background jobs, queues and safe retries
- Caching and rate limiting
- Observability: logs, metrics and traces
- Coming soon
Cloud Development
How the cloud actually works, and how to build on it without a surprise bill.
Planned topics
- Compute: VMs, containers and serverless
- Networking: VPCs, load balancers and DNS
- Storage: object, block and managed databases
- Infrastructure as code
- Kubernetes, minus the hype
- Cost and reliability trade-offs
- Coming soon
Data Structures & Algorithms
The patterns behind coding interviews, animated so they finally stick.
Planned topics
- Big-O intuition without the math anxiety
- Arrays, hashing and two pointers
- Trees and graphs: BFS, DFS and shortest paths
- Heaps, intervals and sliding windows
- Dynamic programming, visualized
- Recognising which pattern a problem needs
- Coming soon
How Computers Really Workfrom transistors to code
Follow your code all the way down to electricity, and back up again.
Planned topics
- Transistors and logic gates
- How a CPU fetches and executes instructions
- Memory hierarchy: registers, caches, RAM
- Compilers, assembly and machine code
- The OS: processes, threads and virtual memory
- From a keypress to a pixel on screen
- Coming soon
Distributed Systems Internals
What really happens when machines have to agree, and why it is so hard.
Planned topics
- Failure models: why distributed is different
- Clocks: Lamport, vector and hybrid
- Replication and quorums in depth
- Consensus: Raft, step by step
- Distributed transactions: 2PC and sagas
- How real systems put it all together
- Coming soon
Database Internalshow databases actually work
How databases actually work under the hood, animated.
Planned topics
- B-trees and LSM trees
- Indexes
- Write-ahead logs
- Transactions and MVCC
- Replication
- Query planning
Want a different topic?
Tell us what you'd like us to explain next.
Suggest a course →
Why it works
Your brain remembers pictures, not paragraphs
Animated, not read
Every concept is animated step by step on a whiteboard-style canvas, so you see how the pieces connect and why.
A framework, not trivia
Module 1 of each course gives you a repeatable approach. Every later module plugs into it.
Real case studies
Each course ends by designing real systems end to end, the way senior engineers reason in design reviews and interviews.
Is this for you?
From first job to senior, and beyond
Think in systems, not snippets.
This is for you if…
- ✓You want to understand how real systems work, and why they're built that way
- ✓You're anywhere on the path from first job to senior and staff, and want to own designs, not just tickets
- ✓You're switching careers into software and want the big picture, not just syntax
- ✓You have a system design interview coming up and want a framework
- ✓You learn better from visuals than from 600-page books
The person behind the diagrams
Who's behind The Coding Gopher
80K+
YouTube subscribers
Watch on YouTube →
5,600+
followers on Substack
Free weekly breakdowns →
Step by step
animated whiteboard-style explainers: every diagram builds up piece by piece
I make animated, whiteboard-style explainers on The Coding Gopher YouTube channel. These courses are the long-form, structured version: every concept animated step by step, no slides full of bullet points.
The channel has grown to more than 80,000 subscribers because the diagrams make hard ideas click. The courses take the same approach further: a complete, ordered path with worked examples, real numbers and the trade-offs interviewers actually probe.
Pricing
One payment. Every course. Forever.
All-Access Lifetime covers both live courses and all 7 on the way, plus anything after. No renewals, ever.
Single course
One course, yours forever
One-time payment
Goes to $149 when Case Studies + DSA launch.
- Lifetime access to one course
- All 9 modules + future updates
- 30-day money-back guarantee*
- Not included: Upcoming courses not included
All-Access Annual
Every course, billed yearly
$12.42/mo, billed yearly
Goes to $199/yr for new members when Case Studies + DSA launch.
Both courses for $89 less than buying them separately (first year)
- Both live courses (18 modules)
- The 7 upcoming courses as they launch, while subscribed
- Bonus: The System Design Visual Guide (80-page PDF)
- Cancel renewal anytime from the billing portal
- 30-day money-back guarantee*
All-Access Lifetime
Everything, forever. Pay once.
One-time payment · founding price, locked in for life
Goes to $399 when Case Studies + DSA launch.
Both live courses + all 7 upcoming courses + every course after that.
2 courses · $238 if bought separately, + every future course. Costs less than Annual from year 3.
- Both live courses (18 modules)
- All 7 upcoming courses the day each launches
- Every course we release after that, too
- Bonus: The System Design Visual Guide (80-page PDF)
- Pay once. No subscription, no renewals
- 30-day money-back guarantee*
All prices in USD · Secure checkout by Stripe (cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay) · Promo codes accepted · 30-day money-back guarantee*
*Subject to our refund policy
30-day money-back guarantee*
Not for you? Send a refund request through our contact form within 30 days. No hard feelings.
*Subject to our refund policyFAQ
Questions, answered
What exactly do I get?
Each course is 9 animated, whiteboard-style video modules (Module 1 is free to watch), with lifetime access and every future update to that course. All-Access Lifetime gives you System Design and AI Engineering today plus all 7 upcoming courses as they launch, for one payment. Watch in any modern browser on your laptop, tablet or phone.
Who is this for?
Anyone who wants to understand how real systems work and level up: from your first job to senior and staff, career switchers and self-taught developers, and anyone preparing for a system design interview. Everything is built up visually, step by step, and interview prep is built in.
How is this different from your free YouTube videos?
The YouTube videos are standalone explainers on one topic each. The courses are a structured path: Module 1 gives you a framework and every later module plugs into it, each topic goes deeper than a short video can, and each course ends with worked case studies, designed end to end. You get an ordered curriculum instead of a recommendation feed, and your progress is saved across devices.
How long does it take?
System Design is 9 modules, about 3 hours of video; AI Engineering is 9 modules, about 2.5 hours of video. Go at your own pace: there are no deadlines, and single courses and All-Access Lifetime never expire.
Will it help with interviews?
It's built around interview frameworks: Module 1 of each course is a repeatable approach for the design round, later modules cover the trade-offs interviewers probe, and each course finishes with full case studies. We can't promise an outcome. You still need to practise out loud, and the courses show you what to practise.
What if it's not for me?
You're covered by our 30-day money-back guarantee*: if it's not for you, send a refund request through the contact form within 30 days. *Subject to our refund policy.
Read the refund policy →Can my company pay?
Yes. Buy 3 or more team seats on the pricing page (3–9 seats are 20% off per seat, 10+ are 30% off) and you get one invite link per teammate. Every purchase comes with a Stripe receipt in USD, and your dashboard's Billing & receipts page keeps them. If your finance team needs anything else, use the contact form.
See team pricing →How do I sign in, and what if I lose access?
There's no password. Sign in with the email you used at checkout and your access code, which is shown on your order confirmation page and your dashboard. Your order number (CG-…) or the receipt number from your Stripe receipt email work too. Lost them? Message us from your purchase email and we'll get you back in.
Go to sign in →
Start thinking in systems today.
Watch Module 1 free, or get every course for one payment.