Alternatives
Products that do what I'm writing a free, illustrated textbook for system design interviews does
- 1

- 2

A free book that's simple in structure, human in explanation
2019
- 3

Make your ideas look awesome, without relying on a designer
2018 · refactoringui.com
- 4DA
2016 · devfreebooks.github.io
- 5IW
2021 · fifty.user-interface.io
- 6

- 7IP
Hey HN, I just wanted to share that after five months of intense work and countless caffeine-fueled writing sessions, "Master Software Architecture: A Pragmatic Guide" is now available. Writing this book was a crazy time. I entirely focused on it, and it took exactly 753 hours of writing, editing, and image editing & resizing(!) until the premiere. Yes, the last one (images) was a killer. If you ever think about writing a book, reserve a lot of time for it unless someone else does it for you. As a result, I am handing you the nearly 400-page book. It is a guide that will help you connect all…
2024 · leanpub.com
- 8IW
Hey folks. Last year I was fortunate enough to sign a deal to write a book with my favorite technical publisher, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. When I started out as an Engineering Manager many years ago, I found that there wasn't a huge amount of material that specifically and practically helped me understand how to do my job. When you learn to program there's all of these amazing tutorials, examples and guides, but what was there for new managers? In response to this, a couple of years ago I started a blog over at https://www.theengineeringmanager.com which got a decent amount of…
2020
- 9

- 10

- 11

- 12

- 13AB
https://urbook.fordes.de/ …a free/libré book about UX research with qualitative methods on motivations, activities written for UX researchers, UX designers and product managers. I have been writing on this book since about 2010 and did a large rewrite during the first half of 2022. (I initally planned this with a bigger tech publisher). This is the link to the full book for online reading: https://jdittrich.github.io/userNeedResearchBook/ (it’s one long page, so it might take a bit to load)
2022
- 14CD
Hello HN, It has been a while since I contributed to the web, so I decided to get back in shape and publish "something". This app is a POC of "what if diagrams were more dynamic". I'm a software engineer by trade, and with conventional tools, I often times struggle to explain flows of data in complex software systems. I got inspired by video games like The Incredible Machine and Factorio, as in some ways, software systems tend to become Rube Goldberg-esque machines ;) As a side quest, I also wanted to craft diagrams faster than text-based tools (ex: mermaid), as I am always forgetting their…
2024 · github.com
- 15

- 16VT
I was frustated by having to draw system design diagrams by hand when discussing it with my team mates or in an interview. So I thought "Wouldn't it be great if someone draws it for me, while I think out loud?". That is when I came up with VoiceDraw. You can just think out loud or discuss your system architecture with a friend/interviewer, the diagrams are automatically drawn along with your reasoning, open questions and tradeoffs beautifully written on to the side. Demo Video: https://youtu.be/36PgHKSuccE
Jun 2026 · voicedraw.com
- 17

- 18

- 19FT
Author here. Feel free to send questions of any kind.
Apr 2026 · thermodynamicsbook.com
- 20

- 21

- 22

- 23

- 24

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →