Interview Strategy
How to approach open-ended design questions, scope requirements, and communicate your thought process effectively.
Grokking Modern System Design Interview
Master system design interviews with structured, in-depth lessons covering distributed systems, building blocks, and real-world design case studies.
Course Sections
Section titled “Course Sections” 1. System Design Interviews Understand what system design interviews are, how to prepare, and how to perform well.
2. Introduction An overview of modern system design using building blocks.
3. Abstractions RPCs, consistency models, and failure models in distributed systems.
4. Non-functional Characteristics Availability, reliability, scalability, maintainability, and fault tolerance.
5. Back-of-the-envelope Calculations Key numbers and resource estimation techniques for system design.
6. Building Blocks The fundamental building blocks used in modern system design.
7. Domain Name System How DNS works — resolution, hierarchy, and caching.
8. Load Balancers Global and local load balancing algorithms and strategies.
9. Databases Database types, replication, partitioning, and trade-offs.
10. Key-value Store Designing a scalable, fault-tolerant key-value store.
11. Content Delivery Network (CDN) How CDNs deliver content globally with low latency.
12. Sequencer Generating unique, causally ordered IDs in distributed systems.
13. Distributed Monitoring Monitoring infrastructure and services at scale.
14. Monitor Server-side Errors Designing a server-side error monitoring and alerting system.
15. Monitor Client-side Errors Capturing and analyzing errors from client applications.
16. Distributed Cache Design, evaluate, and compare distributed caching systems.
17. Distributed Messaging Queue Designing a scalable, durable distributed messaging queue.
18. Pub-sub The publish-subscribe abstraction and how to design a pub-sub system.
19. Rate Limiter Rate limiting algorithms and distributed rate limiter design.
20. Blob Store Designing a scalable blob storage system like S3 or GCS.
21. Distributed Search Design a scalable search system with distributed indexing and querying.
22. Distributed Logging Build a logging service that handles billions of events across distributed systems.
23. Distributed Task Scheduler Design a system to schedule and execute tasks reliably at scale.
24. Sharded Counters Design high-throughput counters using sharding to avoid hot spots.
25. Building Blocks Conclusion Wrap up and the RESHADED framework for approaching any system design problem.
26. Design YouTube End-to-end design of a global video streaming platform like YouTube.
27. Design Quora Design a scalable Q&A platform handling millions of questions and answers.
28. Design Google Maps Design a global maps and navigation system with routing and real-time traffic.
29. Design Yelp Design a proximity-based business discovery service with location search.
30. Design Uber Design a real-time ride-hailing platform with matching, tracking, and payments.
31. Design Twitter Design a social media platform handling millions of tweets, timelines, and notifications.
32. Design Newsfeed Design a scalable newsfeed system with push/pull models and ranking.
33. Design Instagram Design a photo-sharing platform with media storage, feeds, and CDN delivery.
34. Design TinyURL Design a URL shortening service with high availability and low-latency redirects.
35. Design Web Crawler Design a distributed web crawler for indexing the internet at scale.
36. Design WhatsApp Design a real-time messaging platform with end-to-end encryption and offline delivery.
37. Design Typeahead Design an autocomplete suggestion system using distributed tries.
38. Design Google Docs Design a collaborative document editor with real-time concurrent editing.
39. Spectacular Failures Case studies of real-world distributed system failures at Facebook and AWS.
40. Concluding Remarks Course wrap-up, key takeaways, and your completed system design toolbox.
What You’ll Learn
Section titled “What You’ll Learn”Distributed Systems
Core theory behind scalability, availability, consistency, and the CAP theorem — the lingua franca of system design.
Building Blocks
Deep dives into DNS, load balancers, caches, databases, CDNs, message queues, and more.
Real-World Designs
End-to-end case studies: design YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Uber, Google Maps, and more.