About Teach Yourself Systems
Teach Yourself Systems (TYS) is an interactive, code-forward learning resource that helps engineers, product leaders, analysts, and curious thinkers understand, design, and manage complex systems. Each concept chapter—Purpose & Boundary, Stocks & Flows, Feedback Loops, Delays, Leverage Points, Emergence, and more—is paired with runnable simulations so you can watch structure turn into behaviour in real time and then experiment with the model yourself. Whether you read the chapters in sequence or dive straight into the example library and Playground, TYS is designed to make systems thinking tactile, fast, and fun.
From Workshops to Live Simulations
I built the project to deepen my own practice of systems thinking and system dynamics and to push the field forward by grafting it onto modern data-platform and software-engineering habits. Visual “stock-and-flow” diagrams are perfect for workshops, but they become brittle once a model must live inside a CI pipeline, stream fresh data, or survive code review. By expressing feedback loops in Python and wiring them into version control, automated tests, and observability stacks, models stop being classroom slides and start acting as living digital twins—services that can fail fast, roll back, and, most importantly, guide both daily tactical decisions and long-range company strategy.
Models as First-Class Code
TYS therefore makes a simple invitation: treat systems models as first-class code. Write them beside the micro-services they influence, feed them real-time signals from your warehouse or Kafka bus, and let continuous integration rerun scenario tests on every pull request. When Finance, Operations, and Engineering all read from the same repository and see the same Monte-Carlo traces, debates shift from screenshots to parameters, and the organisation can iterate policies with the same rigor it applies to software. If you believe leverage now lives in designing the system that wields abundant AI, TYS gives you the conceptual scaffolding—and the tooling blueprint—to start today.