nurburg.dev: Build and learn

Production-grade backend practice

Where large scale system design gets real

Behind every high-scale system is a series of hard architectural decisions made under pressure. nurburg.dev is where you practice making them — hands-on challenges, real constraints, real tradeoffs, code that runs.

Try A Challenge Learn a concept first

Recently added

Rate Limiter at Scale

Challengeredis

Build a distributed rate limiter that holds under high concurrency — sliding window, Redis Lua, no overshooting.

~90 min Try Now

Table Partition Recreation

Challengepostgres

Transaction log queries grinding to a halt as data grows. Implement table partitioning for sub-100ms performance.

~2 hr Try Now

How Slack's message queue saturated at 10M users

Deep Divemysql

A walkthrough of the architectural decisions that led to queue saturation — and how the team redesigned under load.

8 min read Read Now

Platform

Stop reading about system design. Start building them.

Every challenge runs against real infrastructure — giving you a real environment to debug, iterate, and learn in.

Live Traffic

See exactly where your system fails under real traffic.

nurburg.dev simulates real production traffic against your design to surface bottlenecks. Learn to debug like a top Software Architect.

MySQL CPU

78%↑ 12% vs avg

order-service p95

245msSLO: 200ms ⚠

Redis avail.

99.9%30d uptime

order-service latency

p75

p95

p99

MySQL CPU usage

cpu %

Throughput (req/s)↑ 810 peak

Service health · 24h

warn

error

api-gw

order-svc

mysql

redis

all services nominal now

Zero Setup

Open a challenge. Start building.

No Docker installs. No config rabbit holes. nurburg.dev spins up a fully configured browser-based environment in seconds — so your effort goes into learning key concepts, not setting up complex dev environments.

nurburg.dev/challenges/rate-limiter/env

main.go

limiter.go

store.go

config.go

go.mod

Makefile

package main import ( "context" "net/http") // TODO: implement sliding windowfunc NewLimiter( rate int, window time.Duration,) *Limiter {

Stay Sharp

One challenge a week. A different engineer in six.

Each challenge is scoped, complete, and immediately applicable. Build a habit of tackling one each week, and watch your architectural instincts sharpen over months.

This week's challenges

⚡

Rate Limiter at Scale

Distributed · ~90 min

New

🗄️

Leader Election

Consensus · ~120 min

New

🔁

Idempotent Payments

Transactions · ~75 min

Done

🔍

Distributed Tracing Pipeline

Observability · ~60 min

New

🛡️

Circuit Breaker Pattern

Resilience · ~45 min

Done

Expert Crafted

Created by engineers who've built at scale.

Challenges and deep dives crafted by engineers from Google, Cloudflare, Stripe, and Uber — people who've designed systems under real pressure, at real scale.