The system design terms interviewers expect you to define
9 min read Plain definitions for the system design vocabulary that shows up in interviews, from p99 and quorum to backpressure and idempotency. Read article
System Design
System Design
Designing a news feed and where fanout falls apart
7 min read How push, pull, and hybrid feed generation behave in a system design interview, and the point where each one stops working. Read article
System Design
Where the microseconds go in a trading-platform design round
8 min read How the matching engine, sequencer, and market-data fanout of a trading platform fit together, and where its latency really comes from. Read article
Tools & Reviews
When Kafka beats RabbitMQ, and when it’s the wrong tool
7 min read A practical comparison of Kafka and RabbitMQ, what each is actually good at, and how to pick for your workload. Read article
System Design
How rate limiters actually work when you have more than one server
8 min read A single-server rate limiter is a hash map and a timer; the real interview starts when you add a second server and need one shared, race-free counter. Read article
System Design
Designing an LLM serving system that hits its latency budget
6 min read Prefill and decode, the KV cache budget, continuous batching, and autoscaling GPUs, walked through the way the interview actually goes. Read article
Interview Prep
How the Plaid software engineer interview really runs
5 min read A walkthrough of Plaid’s engineering interview loop, from the finance-themed coding rounds to the reliability-heavy system design and the behavioral bar. Read article
Interview Prep
What the Scale AI interview looks like after the Meta deal
6 min read How Scale AI runs its engineering loop in 2026 and how the Meta deal reshaped the teams that are actually hiring. Read article
Interview Prep
How to pass Ramp’s engineering interview loop
6 min read A round-by-round breakdown of Ramp’s engineering hiring process, from the CodeSignal assessment to the onsite, and the signals that decide the outcome. Read article
Interview Prep
Inside the Fivetran engineering interview loop
7 min read A walk through Fivetran’s recruiter screen, its two coding challenges, the design round, and how to prep for each. Read article
Interview Prep
How Confluent interviews engineers, round by round
6 min read A round-by-round look at Confluent’s engineering interview, from the concurrency-heavy coding screen to the streaming system design loop and the engineering values round. Read article
System Design
How Kafka partitions and delivery guarantees show up in interviews
7 min read Kafka only orders messages within a partition, and the delivery guarantee you actually get depends on a handful of producer and consumer settings interviewers expect you to name. Read article
System Design
The grain question that sinks data modeling interviews
6 min read How data modeling interviews really test you: declaring the grain, choosing star over snowflake, and handling slowly changing dimensions with Type 2. Read article
System Design
Why ELT won, and when interviewers still expect ETL
6 min read The order of two letters changes where your transformations run, what they cost, and which follow-up questions an interviewer asks next. Read article
System Design
How to talk about CAP and consistency without sounding junior
7 min read What interviewers are really checking when they ask about CAP, PACELC, and consistency models, and the database trade-offs a senior answer names. Read article
