System Design Interview Fundamentals by Liu, Rylan
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Introduction & Goals
We are writing this book because we want to help people prepare for a system design interview. Studying for a system design interview is difficult because software engineering is deep and complex. There are a lot of engineering resources, but you only have so much time to prepare. Sometimes even if you understand one component deeply, the interviewer is more interested in something else.
We will not distract you with information that doesn't matter. For example, we will not copy and paste "Numbers Everyone Should Know" from Jeff Dean directly because, in a generalist interview, no one will ask about L1 cache reference being 0.5 ns, since that is on the microprocessor level. However, 150 ms for sending a packet halfway around the world is essential when you’re designing a latency-sensitive globally distributed application.
In a system design interview, you’re not looking to retell a design that you watched on a tech talk and read about on an engineering blog. Passing a system design interview is about having a solid understanding of the fundamentals of the building blocks and piecing them together using problem-solving skills.
When putting together the building blocks, you may have to dig deeper to address the critical bottlenecks. When you come up with a solution to a bottleneck, you may have made another component worse. Then you need to talk about options and trade-offs. And ultimately, you need to show leadership by making a final recommendation. System design is about understanding the problem you’re trying to solve before coming up with a solution. It is not about coming up with a solution and finding a problem to fit into that solution.
Because of that, this book will focus intensely on the system design framework and the fundamental building blocks for system design interviews. We will present how to relate them to system interview questions for each of the fundamental building blocks. For example, instead of telling you an exact clarifying question you should ask the interviewer, we will provide information on the fundamentals of asking good questions. Instead of telling you about how a piece of technology works (you can just search it online), we will focus more on when, where, and why you can apply that technology. Knowing when and why to use the building block comes from experience and is harder to find online, and that’s something we will be focusing on.
Language:English
Author :Liu, Rylan
We are writing this book because we want to help people prepare for a system design interview. Studying for a system design interview is difficult because software engineering is deep and complex. There are a lot of engineering resources, but you only have so much time to prepare. Sometimes even if you understand one component deeply, the interviewer is more interested in something else.
We will not distract you with information that doesn't matter. For example, we will not copy and paste "Numbers Everyone Should Know" from Jeff Dean directly because, in a generalist interview, no one will ask about L1 cache reference being 0.5 ns, since that is on the microprocessor level. However, 150 ms for sending a packet halfway around the world is essential when you’re designing a latency-sensitive globally distributed application.
In a system design interview, you’re not looking to retell a design that you watched on a tech talk and read about on an engineering blog. Passing a system design interview is about having a solid understanding of the fundamentals of the building blocks and piecing them together using problem-solving skills.
When putting together the building blocks, you may have to dig deeper to address the critical bottlenecks. When you come up with a solution to a bottleneck, you may have made another component worse. Then you need to talk about options and trade-offs. And ultimately, you need to show leadership by making a final recommendation. System design is about understanding the problem you’re trying to solve before coming up with a solution. It is not about coming up with a solution and finding a problem to fit into that solution.
Because of that, this book will focus intensely on the system design framework and the fundamental building blocks for system design interviews. We will present how to relate them to system interview questions for each of the fundamental building blocks. For example, instead of telling you an exact clarifying question you should ask the interviewer, we will provide information on the fundamentals of asking good questions. Instead of telling you about how a piece of technology works (you can just search it online), we will focus more on when, where, and why you can apply that technology. Knowing when and why to use the building block comes from experience and is harder to find online, and that’s something we will be focusing on.
Language:English
Author :Liu, Rylan