System Design

Search autocomplete — the suggestions that appear as you type into Google, Amazon, or YouTube — is a deceptively interesting

A notification system is asked at almost every senior system design interview because it surfaces real architectural challenges: fanout at

Designing a ride-sharing app is a rich system design problem that tests your ability to handle real-time location data, geospatial

Video streaming is one of the most infrastructure-intensive system design problems. YouTube streams 1 billion hours of video per day.

A chat system is a perennial system design interview question. It requires you to reason about real-time communication, persistent storage,

Designing a social media feed is one of the most nuanced system design problems you’ll encounter in interviews. It looks

Every system you design needs an API. In system design interviews, choosing the right API style — and explaining why

“Which database would you use?” is one of the most common follow-up questions in system design interviews. Many candidates default

Designing a URL shortener is one of the most common system design interview questions, especially at the intern and new

Caching is the single highest-leverage optimization in most system designs. Before you reach for database sharding or complex infrastructure, a

Message queues decouple the components of a distributed system so that producers and consumers can operate independently. They appear in

A load balancer sits in front of a pool of servers and distributes incoming requests across them. It is one

The CAP theorem comes up in almost every senior-level system design interview. Interviewers ask it because it forces you to

Database sharding is a core scaling technique you’ll need to explain in nearly any large-scale system design interview. The question