How Do I Get Better?

The most obvious way to improve upon systems design knowledge (and arguably only real way to internalize the concepts) is to get more development experience working on complex, data-intensive applications using various solutions.

As you implement more designs, you'll naturally see what works in what scenario, and what doesn't. During the NoSQL hype, a ton of companies found that they did indeed prefer a relational database, and learned a painful lesson in the costs of switching back to one.

Additionally, certain themes carry over in seemingly separate aspects of software development (e.g. patterns for multi-thread concurrency in programming are surprisingly similar to multi-datacenter concurrency, the execution and breakdown of tasks in an ETL process is similarly broken up and timed like rendering components in UI-rich applications).