Educative – Grokking the System Design Interview

System design questions have become a standard part of the software engineering interview process. Performance in these interviews reflects upon your ability to work with complex systems and translates into the position and salary the interviewing company offers you. Most engineers struggle with the system design interview (SDI), partly because of their lack of experience in developing large-scale systems and partly because of the unstructured nature of SDIs. Even engineers who’ve some experience building such systems aren’t comfortable with these interviews, mainly due to the open-ended nature of design problems that don’t have a standard answer. This course is a complete guide to master the SDIs.

It is created by hiring managers who’ve been working at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. We’ve carefully chosen a set of questions that have not only been repeatedly asked at top companies, but also provide a thorough experience to handle any system design problem. Let’s get started!

1. System Design Problems

• System Design Interviews: A step by step guide
• Designing a URL Shortening service like TinyURL
• Designing Pastebin
• Designing InstagramPreview
• Designing Dropbox
• Designing Facebook Messenger
• Designing Twitter
• Designing Youtube or Netflix
• Designing Typeahead Suggestion
• Designing an API Rate Limiter
• Designing Twitter Search
• Designing a Web Crawler
• Designing Facebook’s Newsfeed
• Designing Yelp or Nearby Friends
• Designing Uber backend
• Design Ticketmaster (*New*)
• Additional Resources

2. Glossary of System Design Basics

• System Design Basics
• Key Characteristics of Distributed Systems
• Load Balancing
• CachingPreview
• Data Partitioning
• Indexes
• Proxies
• Redundancy and Replication
• SQL vs. NoSQL
• CAP Theorem
• Consistent Hashing
• Long-Polling vs WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events

3. Appendix

• Contact Us
• Other courses

Preview Lessons

• Designing a URL Shortening service like TinyURL
• Designing Instagram
• Load Balancing
• Caching
• Long-Polling vs WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events
• Contact Us
• Other courses

Details

This course has two parts. In the first part, we will make use of distributed system concepts to design a set of large scale systems – discussing different architectural pieces that are used to build such systems and describing tradeoffs between various choices. The second part contains a glossary of distributed systems basics.

For feedback and suggestions, please contact us at feedback@designgurus.org