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About
Retrystorm is a free place to learn system design for interviews. Each chapter explains one building block, such as caches, queues, replication or load balancers, with concrete numbers. You then test your design in a simulator that runs it under real load and shows where it breaks, and practise full mock interviews.
Who builds it
Retrystorm is built and maintained by Anas Imloul, a software engineer interested in database internals, distributed systems and programming languages. He wants to know why a system was designed the way it was, and what problem forced that design, which is how each chapter here is written.
The simulator is written in Rust and runs in your browser as WebAssembly, so a design you build is simulated on your own machine. Other work includes BigJSON, a Rust viewer and query tool for multi-gigabyte JSON files, and long-form writing on imloul.com, such as a deep dive into skip lists in Redis.
What it is and isn't
The simulator is a teaching model. It makes queues, caches, retries and failures visible, and its numbers are chosen to show how a design behaves, not to predict what a production system will do. Use it to build intuition, then check your real systems against real measurements.
Get in touch
See the contact page for corrections, questions and feedback.