System design: Xiaohan zeng | Medium article

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Xiaohan Zeng

System design

This area is more closely related to the actual working experience. Many questions can be asked during system design interviews, including but not limited to system architecture, object oriented design，database schema design, distributed system design, scalability, etc.

There are many resources online that can help you with the preparation. For the most part I read articles on system design interviews, architectures of large-scale systems, and case studies.

Here are some resources that I found really helpful:

• http://blog.gainlo.co
• http://horicky.blogspot.com
• https://www.hiredintech.com/classrooms/system-design/lesson/52
• http://www.lecloud.net/tagged/scalability
• http://tutorials.jenkov.com/software-architecture/index.html
• http://highscalability.com/

Although system design interviews can cover a lot of topics, there are some general guidelines for how to approach the problem:

1. Understand the requirements first, then lay out the high-level design, and finally drill down to the implementation details. Don’t jump to the details right away without figuring out what the requirements are.
2. There are no perfect system designs. Make the right trade-off for what is needed.

With all that said, the best way to practice for system design interviews is to actually sit down and design a system, i.e. your day-to-day work. Instead of doing the minimal work, go deeper into the tools, frameworks, and libraries you use. For example, if you use HBase, rather than simply using the client to run some DDL and do some fetches, try to understand its overall architecture, such as the read/write flow, how HBase ensures strong consistency, what minor/major compactions do, and where LRU cache and Bloom Filter are used in the system. You can even compare HBase with Cassandra and see the similarities and differences in their design. Then when you are asked to design a distributed key-value store, you won’t feel ambushed.

Many blogs are also a great source of knowledge, such as Hacker Noon and engineering blogs of some companies, as well as the official documentation of open source projects.

The most important thing is to keep your curiosity and modesty. Be a sponge that absorbs everything it is submerged into.

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