I created a free (of course) interactive game that teaches System Design through police investigation cases. The idea is simple: instead of reading loose theory, you investigate failed distributed systems. You analyze logs, inspect components in an interactive diagram, identify the root cause, and recommend a fix. Kind of like an infrastructure detective.

The inspiration came from https://sqlpd.com, which does something similar for SQL. Since what I enjoy most is talking about System Design, I thought it would be a good idea.

There are 33 cases covering replication, consistency, load balancing, caching, messaging, storage, networking, and advanced topics like chaos engineering and distributed tracing.

The cases are sequential and increase in difficulty, with a ranking system from Rookie to Chief.

The project is open source and supports Portuguese and English.

It's live at https://sdpd.live.

yeah this was cool and genuinely informative.

i found myself mostly reading the summary on the left though.. it was doing most of the heavy lifting. the graph looked nice, but it didn’t really add much to the understanding for me.