System Design Interview

A highly recommended book by Alex Xu which goes through system design interview questions. The book is a good introduction to system design which is an area I do not have much experience with as a junior.

The book goes through the steps of a system design interview and provides a good overview of the different types of interviews. The first step is to understand the problem and establish design scope. A common pitfall is when you misunderstand the problem and do not clarify the scope before attempting to design the system. It is often more important to show how you think and ask questions before starting on anything.

The second step is propose high level design and get buy in. The idea is to collaborate with the interviewer when coming up with the approach. This helps to obtain feedback and change any flawed ideas or perceptions early on.

The third step is to do a design deep dive. This is when you go into the details of what to use and how to use them. It is also good to talk about the algorithms or functions required for an optimal solution.

The last step is to wrap up the interview. This is done by discussing potential pain points and limitations of the system. There might also be some error cases that the system needs to handle or how to further scale the system.

The author also went through basics such as CDN and caching which are important to understand when designing a system. It is important to understand how the various technologies work in order to design an optimal system. Which is why it is important to read up and keep up to date. A good resource is diff.blog which helps to aggregate blog posts from the community.

All in all, it was an interesting read and the author provided many interesting examples and references to industry practices that you can read up in your own time. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning the considerations when it comes to designing a system or preparing for interviews.