Blog
How to prepare for system design interviews with spaced repetition, and the ideas behind the cards. Pick a subject.
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8 posts
Study method
How to make system design knowledge stick: flashcards, spaced repetition and the scheduler that decides what you review next.
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8 posts
Data and consistency
Where data lives and what a read is allowed to return: CAP, PACELC, partitioning, consistent hashing and choosing a database.
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8 posts
Traffic and reliability
Moving requests through a system without losing or repeating work: load balancing, rate limiting, queues and idempotency.
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9 posts
Worked designs
Full interview prompts answered step by step, and the back-of-the-envelope estimation that sizes them.
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8 posts
Caching and storage
What you store, where you store it, and how you keep a copy close to the read: caches, CDNs, object stores and specialist databases.
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8 posts
Architecture
How services are cut and how work moves between them: monoliths, microservices, events, CQRS and the API in front.
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8 posts
Consensus and coordination
How distributed nodes agree, elect a leader, lock a resource and finish a write that touches more than one store.
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8 posts
Observability and ops
Knowing the system is healthy and sizing it before the load arrives: metrics, logs, traces, SLOs and capacity planning.