System Design Q&A and Videos

Can I build an android app through visual studio code or do you guys strongly recommend using android studio code instead? I was considering using VS code since that’s the platform I’m used to using and heard that it works well for android apps as well.

I would like to understand how can I drive an effective Tech discovery session (just had a PRD walkthrough) with the team (remotely working) before we start writing a detailed system design document. The engineers are mostly L4 and are still learning how to effectively collaborate instead of full blown meeting.

When software design tasks are given, I spend way too much time in keep looking for other wikis or resources to get information about similar problems.

I don't know when to reach out to senior engineers to get their input because I don't want them to think that I know nothing and how I even got this job. Even after some research, sometimes I can't choose an option over others despite listing pros and cons. I keep thinking about the designs all day and night till the design is finalized. How to take a break and allocate time when solving ambiguous problems?

I have gone through a post in Slack about paper reading and its benefits.

As an Android developer, I did not find paper reading will be useful in my day to day job. Because the system design for a frontend Android is different.

I have this doubt from long time: How can i improve my design skills in Android? I see many people in our org come up with a good doubts and points in architecture discussions, but I am not able to do that. Could you please help me with what I can do to improve these design skills? I believe I should constantly do something to master this, but I am not sure what to do.

One way is I can learn it by doing - I am learning from my current project but that is not so scalable. I want to multiply my learning curve here.

Thank you in advance.

Hello Taro!

I'm working as tech lead in company of approximately 500 people, we are creating tech products both internally and for external clients with a data-science focus.

As part of my yearly objectives, I'm working on improving technical architecture decisions across the company, and I'm looking for best practices, advice and references on the subject.

In the past we have faced some issues such as:

• tech lead looking for feedback on a target architecture not finding anyone willing/ready to do so
• an internal product whose code was so poor it had to be almost completely rewritten.
• teams struggling to solve a problem that had been already solved in other part of the company.

Actions I have been considering:

• encouraging the use of Architecture Decision Records
• set-up a team of senior technical profiles that could be mobilised to review an architecture

In general I'm weary of any solution that would:

• remove accountability from engineers
• create coupling between unrelated projects
• add a lot of meetings

Thanks a lot!

I am hitting the point in my career where I am responsible for designing newer systems to handle more novel problems. I will use my last project as an example.

I had to redesign our game engine to handle more complex scenarios. I decided to "eat the frog" and come up with a few very complex game interactions to test if any of our designs would satisfy those test cases. After about 1 month of development, we landed on a design. This design also passed all the test cases for our old engine.

I think back and wonder if I could've done it more incrementally. We didn't really ship anything during that time, just tested out different ideas in our feature branches. There are still some outstanding questions for that project that are as low level as "should we use an abstract base class or an interface for this abstraction" to "here's an even more complex interaction we don't know how to handle, but could feasibly happen".

Now I am designing a new animation pipeline and don't want to get stuck in the same 1 month long marathon with only a design doc to show for it. As a newer senior engineer and lead, a solid design doc seems like a win, but it was a tough month.

In one way, this is different than having all the work known and chunking it out. We aren't sure what we'd come up with. Maybe that's the nature of R&D. On the other hand, work is work, and I'm sure there are methodologies for making more consistent progress even in R&D.

Interested in how other people approach this dilemma. I think the crux of the issue is I wasn't sure our design would work until we built and tested it against the test cases, and I have a nagging feeling we got a little lucky.

Hello, I'm currently actively interviewing and more than once, I found myself not progressing due to some knowledge gaps on things that companies seem to expect at my level.

I worked as a backend engineer for 3 years after a coding bootcamp, mostly in product features and APIs. Distributed systems is not something I did on a daily basis.

I have struggled with system design interview questions asking about databases, concurrency, search, among other things. How can I fill those gaps to the level I can pass these interviews?

Here's what I'm going to do, and I'm looking to get advice on whether I should do, stop doing, or do something else that I didn't list.

1. Stanford Databases courses (5 total):
2. Read "Understanding Distributed Systems" by Roberto Vitillo
3. Practice system design interviews with a partner

Thank you for your help!

I am good at Systems design. It comes very naturally to me when compared to DSA in that I exhibit systems-level holistic thinking.

Could this be an indication that I should play up to my strenghts and think about becoming a Product manager or architect as opposed to struggling being a developer?

Hi! I'm a new member looking to participate in the book club sessions for the Designing data intensive applications book. How can I get a copy of the book?

Recruiters often mention that a staff engineer interview involves a deeper dive compared to a senior software engineer interview, but it's not clear how much deeper it needs to go. Are there any resources that can clarify this?

I received feedback from my manager indicating that I need to improve my understanding of upstream and downstream dependencies when working on big ambiguous problems. They suggested that I should propose solutions that properly consider these dependencies' requirements as in my preview project I missed a few so the tech lead on my team had to point those out. Could you recommend any resources? techniques?

I learned that my whole team is kind of new (Salesforce acquired this product), and they have just started contributing to the core platform. There are currently a lot of approvals necessary to merge front-end code into the system. This is rough as there's many epics connected to front-end work, and there is not a single senior person in the team which can take charge of looking into the high level architecture, following best practices, and doing better planning to release the code to prod.

I am the only full-stack Staff engineer here, and this is why my EM wants me to create a master front-end tech spec for the team. As an example of something this doc can cover: At Salesforce, there are multiple ways to communicate with the back-end API, each of which has their pros and cons but that information is scattered - We can consolidate that info into this doc.

Given that I haven't written any front-end code here at Salesforce, this task seems hard and I'm unsure how to do this without looking stupid.

I am trying to get better at System Design and trying to understand the design of various systems. I'm very curious about the System Design of Taro, and how Taro is built.

• What technologies are used for frontend and backend?
• What is the backend architecture used? What are the databases used?
• How are the videos streamed, payments handled, user logins handled?
• How does Taro scale with users and give a smooth experience?
• How is the platform optimized from the perspective of cloud costs?
• When the number of users on Taro increases by an order of magnitude, what are the changes to the architecture you would consider doing?
• Is the website built from scratch? Or are there any libraries and frameworks available to make it easier?
• Taro seems like a well-built platform with smooth user experience and a lot of features. I'm surprised that all of this built by just one engineer (Charlie). What's the secret sauce? What are the tradeoffs made to still make things work with less resources?
• What is the decision-making process that went into making all these decisions?

• I am not great with numbers so capacity planning part for storage, memory, cache, bandwidth takes 5-10mins as part of the initial requirement gathering
• Is there a way to keep it short or you just have to memorize some bytes and 1 million request/day = 12 request/second conversions?

How is secrets management done in big tech? What does engineering excellence look like in this part of DevOps?

Recently, while working on a project that is very open-ended, I realized part way through the project that the initial solution I had come up with for the problem would work only partially and in order to solve the problem fully, I would actually need double the amount of time I had estimated earlier. Since the initial estimate was in months, I feel really terrible about this. I made sure to report this to my chain as soon as I discovered this, but I'm curious: how common is it for others to miss their estimates? I'd like to gauge whether I am alone in this situation. Furthermore, how do people typically manage the disappointment and pressure that arise from missed deadlines, especially in exploratory or open-ended projects?

In his course, Alex mentioned that the system design used in practice at companies is very different from the system design studied for interviews.

There are books such as System Design Interview that are used for system design interviews. What's your take on the book?

Designing Data-Intensive Applications is another commonly cited book. What's your take on this book? What other good books you recommend to get better at system design in practice?

There are a few types of architectures floating everywhere such as domain- driven design, hexagonal architecture, event-driven architecture, microservices, etc. I know microservices is very well used in practice. What's your take on the usage of other architectures? They seem pretty abstract. Is learning them worth it?

I'm currently studying for software engineering interviews, but I'm having a hard time deciding how to divide up my time between doing LC problems and going over system design concepts. It can feel overwhelming since both categories have so much to cover. I also have a family, so most of my studying gets done after my kid goes to sleep at around 7 PM. Since my team is in the west coast and I'm in the east coast, I do get some extra time in the morning to work out at the gym and go through some LC problems. I'm currently going through Neetcode's course as a refresher. For those of you who have aced your interviews, how did you divide up your time on different topics? Did you mostly spend your time on LeetCode? I'd be happy to hear any recommendations.

My main goal: I want to be interview-ready no matter what. I currently work at a big tech company and I've been there for 4 years now, but I haven't seen much growth and now I'm seeing that I could have negotiated more when I first got my offer. I was asked 2 LC-type problems, and I feel I got lucky with them because I hadn't extensively gone through all the different patterns and data structures. It was my first time getting RSUs and I wish I had known more about negotiation tactics as well. I feel that if I be ready for interviews, I can apply and definitely increase my comp by a lot. The motivation is for me to overcome the fear of DS&A problems and not stop myself from applying to positions just because I'd be asked LC-type questions. I also know that I can double my comp with the right negotiation tactics and with my years of experience.

It seems that containerization and serverless are two competing cloud-native technologies. In big tech, which technology is more common and therefore more valuable to have for a new candidate?

Hi!

I had mic issues in the OH and couldn't ask live. How would you recommend I prepare for System Design interview questions, especially since I feel my experience at my previous company didn't prepare me well for these?

I have 2.5 years of experience at a big tech company and was recently laid off. Ideally, I’m aiming for an ~L4 level position as I was L3 in my past role and was nearing promotion. I’m getting more interviews at start-ups now, and they typically focus on system design rather than leetcode questions. At my past company, the tools were so powerful that I didn’t get the same breadth of experience a new grad might get at a smaller company. For example, I never touched or thought about our database or considered scalability for our services. In hindsight, I should have taken the initiative to find projects outside of my team with more scope, but now I know better!

My current plan is to read "System Design Interview" by Alex Xu and go through the Taro System Design Masterclass. Do you have any feedback on this plan? I recently had my first system design interviews and have more coming up. I want to prepare as best as I can with the time I have. I’ve accepted that I may not excel at first, but any feedback to improve my preparation plan and mindset would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I'm currently working on building blockchain infrastructure. I would like to build my profile to be a good infra engineer capable of building any type of infra. How to find some good side-projects to strengthen my abilities as an infra engineer. What are the different aspects I should master while doing the side projects?

This is what I am thinking of doing as of now. I'm planning to build a social media platform using different architectures such as microservices, event-driven architecture, monolithic architecture, and trying to deploy in various ways such as using K8S, deploying it on ECS, etc., and comparing the performance. It seems pretty big. Is this the right size and a good example for a side project for infra engineers? Please suggest anything else I could do get better.

How common is it that folks self-sabotage their interviews? I think I might have during one of them unintentionally. I had interviewed at a FAANGMULA company and mentioned a competitor. The pay was low compared to my level, but also, I felt like it was more junior and I tended to go very long winded (lack of practice) for various questions. It seems I am a bit out of practice for soft skill interview screens, though usually I kick butt on these and spend way more time on DSA than anything (my weakest area since I'm rusty and system design and behavioral interviews don't scare me at all).

Thoughts?