Алекс Хью (Alex Xu)
System Design Interview: An Insider’s Guide All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
About the author:
Alex Xu is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur. Previously, he worked at Twitter, Apple, Zynga and Oracle. He received his M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University.
He has a passion for designing and implementing complex systems.
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Table of Contents
System Design Interview: An Insider’s Guide
FORWARD
CHAPTER 1: SCALE FROM ZERO TO MILLIONS OF USERS
CHAPTER 2: BACK-OF-THE-ENVELOPE ESTIMATION
CHAPTER 3: A FRAMEWORK FOR SYSTEM DESIGN INTERVIEWS
CHAPTER 4: DESIGN A RATE LIMITER
CHAPTER 5: DESIGN CONSISTENT HASHING
CHAPTER 6: DESIGN A KEY-VALUE STORE
CHAPTER 7: DESIGN A UNIQUE ID GENERATOR IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS
CHAPTER 8: DESIGN A URL SHORTENER
CHAPTER 9: DESIGN A WEB CRAWLER
CHAPTER 10: DESIGN A NOTIFICATION SYSTEM
CHAPTER 11: DESIGN A NEWS FEED SYSTEM
CHAPTER 12: DESIGN A CHAT SYSTEM
CHAPTER 13: DESIGN A SEARCH AUTOCOMPLETE SYSTEM
CHAPTER 14: DESIGN YOUTUBE
CHAPTER 15: DESIGN GOOGLE DRIVE
CHAPTER 16: THE LEARNING CONTINUES
AFTERWORD
FORWARD
We are delighted that you have decided to join us in learning the system design interviews.
System design interview questions are the most difficult to tackle among all the technical interviews. The questions require the interviewees to design an architecture for a software system, which could be a news feed, Google search, chat system, etc. These questions are intimidating, and there is no certain pattern to follow. The questions are usually very big scoped and vague. The processes are open-ended and unclear without a standard or correct answer.
Companies widely adopt system design interviews because the communication and problem-solving skills tested in these interviews are similar to those required by a software engineer’s daily work. An interviewee is evaluated based on how she analyzes a vague problem and how she solves the problem step by step. The abilities tested also involve how she explains the idea, discusses with others, and evaluates and optimizes the system. In English, using “she”