Pragmatic System Design

This course aims to prepare you for system design interviews, as well as discusses how you could apply this knowledge in your day to day job.

In real world, most of the engineers don’t get to design new systems often. Some don’t get to design them at all. In many companies architecture is something only a few individuals do regularly. But when it comes to interviewing, we suddenly expect everyone to be master in system design. This course tries to cover some of the basic topics, as well as provide you with my approach to some of the most common system design interview questions.

Second purpose of this course is to provide senior engineers with an alternative view to system design. What I see in the industry is that we don’t discuss design among ourselves much. It becomes a sensitive topic, because no real world design is perfect. And that’s something I hope to change.

There are two ways I suggest to consume the course. If you have plenty of time, just watch it start to finish. I tried to construct it in a logical order, so you will accumulate more and more confidence as you go.

Alternatively, if you are short on time, or if you aren’t preparing actively for interviews at the moment, you can start with the design videos, and if you aren’t familiar with one of the topics I discuss, there should be either a video for that or a link to a relevant article.

The goal of system design interview is usually to cover multiple topics. It evaluates the breath of knowledge first, depth of knowledge second. For that reason, I tried to keep the theoretical part on each topic rather brief. That is – it’s as deep as I expect as an interviewer from my candidates.

Finally, I will repeat myself and say that no design is perfect. There are always tradeoffs, there are always compromises that you must make. And each design is personal. It depends on what are your areas of expertise. When you watch my videos, please don’t treat them as the ultimate way I would design a system, but more as a collection of ideas of how to approach the topic.

If there are more system design interview questions you’d like me to solve or additional topics you’d like me to cover, let me know!