Systems Thinking & Capstone

Filimon Shferaw 10 sections

Course Overview

What You Will Learn

Bringing together all prior learning, this capstone class focuses on holistic problem-solving and real-world application through a systems thinking lens. Students will learn to view software systems as interconnected wholes—analyzing feedback loops, dependencies, trade-offs, and emergent behavior across development, infrastructure, security, and business domains. The course emphasizes architectural decision frameworks, risk assessment, scalability trade-offs, and cross-system optimization. The majority of the class is dedicated to a comprehensive capstone project, where students design, build, deploy, and monitor a complete, production-ready system, integrating programming logic, APIs, automation, cloud infrastructure, observability, security, and compliance. By the end, learners will demonstrate mastery across the entire software lifecycle, preparing them for senior technical roles or architectural leadership positions.

Program Curriculum

Course Content

Explore the full learning path section by section.

What is Systems Thinking?
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Why Systems Thinking Matters in Real Engineering Work
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From Components to System Behavior
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How to Approach a Large-Scale Design Problem
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Functional and Non-Functional Requirements Revisited
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Capacity Estimation and Traffic Assumptions
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Design Trade-Offs and Architectural Justification
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Designing Scalable APIs
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Rate Limiting and Abuse Protection
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Caching Strategies for API Performance
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Load Balancing and Traffic Distribution
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API Gateway as a Traffic and Policy Layer
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What is Multi-Tenancy?
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Tenant Isolation Models
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Data, Security, and Customization in SaaS Platforms
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Scaling a Multi-Tenant Product Safely
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Event-Driven Microservices
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Kafka Streams and Consumer Groups
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CQRS Revisited
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Distributed Transaction Patterns: Saga and Two-Phase Commit
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Command and Event Flow in Real Systems
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What is a Service Mesh?
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Istio and Linkerd Overview
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API Gateway vs Service Mesh
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Traffic Policies, Retries, and Routing Rules
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Observability Stack Integration
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Logging, Tracing, and Metrics Correlation
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Monitoring Dashboards with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki
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Operational Signals and Incident Diagnosis
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High Availability and Disaster Recovery Revisited
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Resiliency Engineering Principles
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Chaos Testing and Controlled Failure Injection
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CAP and PACELC Revisited
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Designing for Failure as a Normal Condition
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Why Performance Testing Matters
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Load Testing with Locust, JMeter, and k6
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Benchmarking and Baseline Measurement
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Database, Cache, and API Latency Tuning
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Using Performance Data to Drive Architecture Decisions
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Final Project: Build and Deploy a Cloud-Based Microservice System
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Architecture Documentation and Design Communication
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Postmortem Writing and Incident Learning
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Integration Case Study Review
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Diagnostic Test Retake and Skill-Gap Review
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GitHub Portfolio Setup
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LinkedIn Presentation and Career Positioning
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Instructors

Meet the Instructor

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    Filimon Shferaw
    Senior Software Engineer

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Systems Thinking & Capstone

Systems Thinking & Capstone

$110.00
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Category —
Instructor Filimon Shferaw
Sections 10
Status Not enrolled