a massive portion of software engineering and system design is just learning about core concepts and looking for recurring patterns, took me way too long to realize
System design is basically:
Slow database? Add a cache.
Too many requests? Add a load balancer.
Tasks taking too long? Add a queue.
One server struggling? Add more servers.
Repeated failures? Add retries.
Traffic getting expensive? Add a CDN.
Data getting huge? Add database sharding.
If you ever want to feel humble, remember there is probably a piece of Fortran written in 1974 that is currently processing your bank transactions flawlessly, while my cloud-native Docker container just crashed over a YAML indentation error.