The System Design Interview: A Step-by-Step Framework
A step-by-step framework for system design interviews: clarifying requirements, estimates, APIs, data models, high-level design, deep dives and trade-offs.
Topic
System Design
Frameworks, walkthroughs and interview preparation.
Design a URL Shortener: A System Design Walkthrough
A URL shortener system design: requirements, capacity estimates, API, short-code generation, database choice, caching, analytics and scaling trade-offs.
Microservices vs Monolith: A Decision Framework
Microservices or a monolith? The real costs and benefits of each, the modular monolith middle ground, and a practical framework for deciding and migrating.
Designing a Notification System at Scale
How to design a notification system for push, email and SMS at scale: requirements, architecture, queues, templates, preferences, retries and deduplication.
Design a Chat System
How to design a chat app: WebSockets, message flow and ordering, storage, group chat fan-out, presence, offline delivery and multi-device sync.
Design a News Feed
How to design a social news feed: fan-out on write vs read, the celebrity problem, feed caches, ranking, cursor pagination and media delivery.
Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation for System Design
How to do back-of-the-envelope estimates for system design: useful numbers, QPS, storage and bandwidth maths, latency orders of magnitude and a worked example.