System Design Interview Insiders Guide

1. What is the book about as a whole?

It's a practical book about passing a system design interview - with some general tips and many examples of ready designs.

2. What is being said in detail, and how?

The book goes through several examples on how to deal with system design interview. There are 4 phases:

1. Ask clarifying questions: There are recurring questions - center around how many requests should be supported, file modalities and supported user interfaces. 2. Propose a high-level schema Draw boxes to get understanding of the schema. Involve the intervewer to get agreement on the high-level design. 3. Go deeper and expand on the schema Expand the boxes - the DB, memory, cache, load balancing, state, etc 4. Answer questions or talk about additional points Talk about anything that might show deper understanding - bottlenecks, failure modes, scaling.

3. Is the book true, in whole or part?

The book gives a decent plan on how to handle system design interviews. However, I feel like the most difficult parts about coming up with schema on the spot are not talked about. I struggle with a blank page and I'm still not sure how to invent a design on the spot - even though I can recognize that the provided sample designs are good.

4. What of it?

I can fallback on some talking points so that I don't stay silent - talking about memory/cache for speed, load balancer for availability and replication for scale is always great to show some engineering experience. Also, bloom filter and consistent hashing came up repeatedly so I should be familiar and implement them.