Examples of decisions that imply tradeoffs

Make sure that you know the data throughput and the number of users. This way you can create a software solution capable, scalable, without over-optimisations. Some questions to keep in mind during interview:

• What is the expected read-to-write ratio?
• How many concurrent request...

System design questions can often be as general as “How would you design Product X?”

“Oh, you mean what would be the best way to design a product that has had hundreds of software engineers working on it for a decade? Sure, let me answer that in 45 minutes or less!”

Clarify any ambiguity you have at the start of the interview. All your assumptions, speak them out loud and discuss them with your recruiter. Make sure you are on the same page, by asking:

•  What is the goal of the system?
• Who are the users of the system? What do they need it fo...

Think and discuss what are the main features that you will cover. As you can imagine, describing the whole infrastructure in detail is impossible in 45 minutes. Some questions you might ask are:

• Do we want to discuss the end-to-end experience or just the API?
• What clients do we...

Once you have all the information collected from the previous steps, you can start actually designing the system. The best approach for this is to start by sketching all the parts that the solution is made out of. Once you have that done, you can take each part and provide more details, but make ...

While interviewing, some companies will be oriented more on the architecture part, while others focus more on the DS&A optimisations. Coming back to Step 1, it's important to understand what are the expectations of your interviewer and try to deliver based on them.

Keeping that in mind, tr...

Prior to presenting the steps you should follow once the interview begins, there are some qualilties that will help you leave a better impresion to the interviewer:

1. Honesty
2. Confidence 
3. Willingness to learn

T...

In the beginning we all get the feeling that System Design is a huge subject to comprehend, which pretty much is true. The secret for this type of intreviews is to understand as much as possible what are the expectations of your recruiter and what will be the structure of the interview.

Bei...