6-Week Study Plan for SDE-2

Understand how systems communicate and the tradeoffs in different approaches.

Master SQL vs NoSQL tradeoffs, indexing, replication, sharding, and caching strategies.

Understand CAP theorem, consensus, message queues, and reliability patterns.

Practice the most frequently asked problems — URL shortener, rate limiter, chat systems.

Tackle harder problems and master reusable patterns like CQRS, Saga, and event sourcing.

Understand internals of Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch. Practice articulating trade-offs.