Source: https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview
Notes & Reflections
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SDIs are particularly important interviews because they demonstrate your ability to design, understand (and presumably implement) complex systems and your thought process
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Basic steps/formula that applies to designing systems during SDIs
- Clarify requirements: you’re not gonna design a robust, full-featured system, so just ask what they’re looking for
- Estimate the scope: similar to clarifying requirements, except asking questions around traffic/load/amount of data and then showing confidence around what that does to scope of the system
- Design the API: outline method signatures that do the things you’re designing for
- Design the Data Models: talk about structure of the data tables (fields & objects we will care about)
- High-level design: boxes and arrows
- Detailed design: zoom into a handful of the components and talk about technical tradeoffs associated
- Identify and resolve bottlenecks: can the system fail gracefully? any key parts we want to monitor/alert on?
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Designing TinyURL