Hello guys, If you're dreaming of advancing your career this summer—especially in the hot fields of AI, LLM Engineering, Agentic AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and more—there’s no better time than now to dive in. For a limited period, Coursera Plus is available at 40% off: just $240 for 3 months (regular price $399). This offer ends soon, so time is of the essence.
Here’s why this deal is worth your attention—and how Coursera Plus can help you build job-ready skills that stand out.
Hello guys, Interview preparation and upskilling in 2026 look very different from a few years ago. Companies now expect engineers to be strong not just in coding, but also in system design, architecture tradeoffs, communication, and real world problem solving.
This is where modern learning platforms like Educative, ByteByteGo, and Exponent stand out.
Instead of scattered tutorials, they offer structured paths, practical examples, and interview focused practice that mirrors what top tech companies actually test.
Educative, ByteByteGo, and Exponent have become three of the most trusted platforms for developers aiming to level up their careers. Each one focuses on a different but complementary area, which makes them especially powerful when used together.
In last 5 years, I’ve personally tried all three platforms and each offers something unique for Software engineers preparing for FAANG level interviews or aiming to grow into senior or architect-level roles.
The best part? All of them are offering massive discounts as part of their YEAR End and NEW YEAR sale that you won’t find again for the rest of the year.
This means, if you always wanted to join ByteByteGo,Educative.io or Exponent then now is the best time to join them. They are offering anywhere from 40 to 60% discounts on awesome deals for this Christmas and New Year period.
Let’s break down why you should join these platforms on 2026?
The simple answer to this question is to prepare well for both System Design and Coding interviews to get a job in FAANG companies, which is dream of every software engineers out there. Now, let’s go a little bit deeper to find out what are USPs of each of these three platforms and what they offer.
If system design interviews are your biggest challenge, ByteByteGo is hard to beat. It focuses almost entirely on helping engineers understand how large scale systems are designed in the real world.
Concepts like load balancing, caching, databases, messaging systems, consistency, and scalability are explained visually and step by step.
ByteByteGo is especially useful for mid level and senior engineers who already know how to code but struggle to clearly explain design decisions during interviews. The content is concise, practical, and aligned with how architects think.
Their Lifetime Plan at 50% off during year end and New Year sales is particularly attractive. One payment gives you permanent access, which is rare and valuable if you want a long term system design reference.
Here is the link to get discount — ByteByteGo Lifetime Plan (50% OFF)
Educative.io is ideal if you prefer learning by reading, coding, and experimenting rather than watching endless videos.
Its interactive text based courses make it easy to go deep into topics like data structures, system design, distributed systems, cloud, and now AI engineering.
One of Educative’s biggest strengths is its breadth. You can prepare for coding interviews, learn backend and frontend fundamentals, explore machine learning, or practice real world system design, all on one platform.
Here are my favorite Educative courses for System Design and FAANG interviews:
Educative also offers hands-on labs, cloud sandboxes, and AI powered features that help explain concepts, review your answers, and guide you when you are stuck.
As part of their year end and New Year promotions, Educative is offering 55% off Premium Plus for 2 years, which gives full access to courses, projects, labs, and AI features. This makes it a strong long term investment for developers planning consistent growth in 2026.
Here is the link to get discount — 👉 Educative Premium Plus (55% OFF)
Exponent shines when it comes to interview realism. It focuses on coding interviews, system design interviews, and behavioral interviews, all taught by engineers from top tech companies.
What really sets Exponent apart is its emphasis on mock interviews and structured feedback.
If you already know the theory but freeze during interviews, Exponent helps bridge that gap. You learn how to communicate your thinking, ask clarifying questions, and handle follow ups confidently.
Exponent’s Annual Plan at 70% off during their year end and New Year discounts makes it one of the most cost effective ways to practice real interview scenarios with guidance.
Here is the link to get discount — Exponent Annual Plan (70% OFF)
While Educative, ByteByteGo, and Exponent form a strong core, a few other platforms can further accelerate your preparation:
Last 3 years have been very turbulent for Software engineers. With massive layoffs, the competition on have increased multiple fold and the hiring bar is not getting lower.
Interviews are testing deeper understanding, clearer communication, and stronger system thinking.
Joining platforms like Educative, ByteByteGo, and Exponent now gives you time to build those skills gradually instead of cramming at the last minute.
With year end and New Year discounts offering 50% to 70% off, this is one of the best opportunities to invest in your career at a fraction of the usual cost.
Whether your goal is a better job, a higher salary, or simply becoming a stronger engineer, these platforms give you a structured and proven path to get there in 2026.
And, if you just want to join one platform, I recommend to join ByteByteGo to learn theory and System design concepts better. Ideally, you need to combine Codemia.io with ByteByteGo to prepare really well for System Design interviews in 2026.
Other Programming and Interview Articles you may like
Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like this article then please share them with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note.
P. S. — If you just want to do one thing at this moment, go join ByteByteGo and start practicing System Design questions, you will thank me later. Make it a goal for the new year and you will surely be a better Software Engineer.
Hello guys, if you are preparing for System design interviews or Software Design Interviews, then you must have come across System Design Interview - An Insider's Guide by Alex Xu, one of the most popular book on System Design after Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. I first come across Alex Xu on Twitter when one of his image about how HTTPS works went viral. The image was quite detailed and presentable so I start following Alex and then I come across ByteByteGo, his online System design course and his book System Design Interview - An Insider's Guide.
Hello guys, if you have heard about "Software Engineering at Google" book and wondering whether its worth your time and money or not then you have come to the right place. I mentioned about this book on, one of must read books for developers and in this article, I am going to provide you detailed review of this book. While most technical titles teach you how to write code. Software Engineering at Google takes a different path—it's not about syntax or algorithms, but about building software systems that endure or can survive on production.
Hello guys, REST has now become a standard way to develop web services and when it comes to Java, there are many frameworks and libraries available, e.g. JAX-RS, Restlet, Jersey, RESTEasy, Apache CFX etc., but I encourage Java developers to use Spring MVC to develop RESTful web services.
Some of you might ask, why use Spring MVC Framework to develop RESTful web services in Java? What are the advantages, and why is it better than other frameworks and libraries available out there?
Well, the most important reason, I think, to use Spring for developing RESTful web service is that you can use your Spring MVC experience for developing RESTful web services and you don’t need to learn a new framework or library, which means you can quickly roll out your REST API.
This is one of the biggest advantages, i.e. leveraging your years of experience on Spring MVC to expose your application as REST APIs.
Another reason is that Spring has excellent support for developing RESTful web services.
In the last couple of versions, starting from Spring version 3.0, it has provided a lot of enhancements to Spring MVC to provide first-class REST support. It has provided dedicated annotations, e.g. @RestController and @ResponseStatus to make the development of RESTful resources even easier in Spring 4.0.
It’s also not only help you to create RESTful web services but also provides classes to consume REST resources, like you can use the RestTemplate class to consume RESTful resources.
There are many more utility classes and annotations which make the development of RESTful web services in Spring easier and seamless and I’ll share a couple of them in this article to prove my point that using Spring to develop RESTful Web service is the right decision.
By the way, before you start with the RESTful web services using Spring Framework, you must know how to use Spring framework and key Spring theory and principles like dependency injection and spring eco-systems and libraries.
If you are new to Spring, you should first start with a course like [NEW] Spring Boot 3, Spring 6 & Hibernate for Beginners by Chad Darby to learn not just Spring but also Spring Boot and HIbernate, this will help you a lot for REST based development in Java and Spring.
As I told you in the first paragraph, we can use Spring MVC to create and consume RESTful web services. Now, let’s see those supports in a little bit more details so that you can make the best use of them and quickly develop the RESTful services you always wanted.
In Spring MVC, a controller can handle the requests for all HTTP methods, which is a backbone of RESTful web services. For example, you can handle a GET method to perform read operations, POST methods to create resources, PUT methods to update resources, and DELETE methods to remove resources from the server.
From Spring 3.2 onwards, you can also handle PATCH requests. By the way, if you are not familiar with the Spring MVC framework, then you should first take a look at that; Spring MVC For Beginners is a good place to begin.
In the case of REST, the representation of data is very important and that’s why Spring MVC allows you to bypass View-based rendering altogether by using the @ResponseBody annotation and various HttpMessgeConverter implementations.
By using this, you can directly send a response to a client, e.g. the resource clients want and also in the format they want. See here to learn more about HttpMessageConvert and @ResponseBody annotation.
The Spring 4.0 release added a dedicated annotation, @RestController, to make the development of RESTful web services even easier.
If you annotate your controller class using @RestController instead of @Controller then Spring applies message conversations to all handler methods in the controller.
This means you don’t need to annotate each method with the @ResponseBody annotation. This also makes your code much cleaner.
One of the main differences between a REST web service and a normal web application is that the REST pass resource identifies data in the URI itself, e.g. /messages/101, while web applications normally use a query parameter, e.g. /messages?Id=101.
If you remember, we use @RequestParam to get the value of those query parameters but, not to worry, Spring MVC also provides a @PathVariable annotation which can extract data from a URL. It allows the controller to handle requests for parameterized URLs.
Another key aspect of RESTful web services is Representation, meaning the same resource can be represented in different formats, i.e. JSON, XML, HTML, etc. Thankfully, Spring provides several view implementations and views resolvers to render data as JSON, XML, and HTML.
For example, ContentNegotiatingViewResolver can look at the file extension of requests or Accept header to find out the correct representation of a resource for the client.
Similar to the @ResponseBody annotation, which is used for converting the response to the format client wants (by using HttpMessageConverts), Spring MVC also provides @RequestBody annotation, which uses HttpMethodConverter implementations to convert inbound HTTP data into Java objects passed into a controller's handler method.
If you are not familiar with handler methods and Spring MVC in general, then you can also check out 3 ways to learn Spring MVC.
The Spring framework also provides a template class, RestTemplate, which is similar to JdbcTemplate, and JmsTemplate, which can consume REST resources. You can use this class to test your RESTful web service or develop REST clients.
These were some of the important features of the Spring MVC framework which assist in developing RESTful web services. As I said earlier, the most important reason for me to choose Spring for developing RESTful resources is that I can use my existing knowledge of the framework, which means no steep learning curve.
If you look at it from a high level, developing RESTful services is not very different from developing a web application.
The fundamental difference is that in the case of the former, we mostly deal with human users where in case of REST you have to deal with non-human users, mostly rich JavaScript clients and mobile applications.
This key difference then causes other differences, like representing data in JSON or XML instead of HTML which is suitable for human users but not for non-human systems. If you want to learn more before starting developing production level RESTful web services using Spring, REST with Spring course is a good place to start.
Other Spring and REST Resources you may like
How to build Microservices with Spring Cloud?
Microservices With Spring Boot and Spring Cloud
Difference between Restlet, Jersey, and RESTEasy in Java?
What is the use of DispatcherServlet in Spring MVC?
How to enable Spring security in a Java web application?
Spring in Action by Craig Walls
Spring Framework 5: Beginner to Guru
My favorite courses to learn Spring Boot in Depth
My favorite courses to learn WebFlux and Reactive Spring
Thanks for reading this article, if you like these reasons for developing RESTful web services using Spring then please share with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note.
P. S. — If you want to learn Spring MVC in depth and need course then I also suggest you to join Spring Framework : Beginner to Guru course on Udemy. It’s a great course to start with.
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