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The Design Interview: System Design: Uncharted

Courses System DesignThe Design Interview

The Design InterviewPro

Frame open prompts, estimate scale, narrate designs, defend tradeoffs, and complete two full mocks.

System Design
Unit 12 of 12
20 lessons
158 min
460 XP

This unit is part of Pro. Upgrade to open every lesson in it.

Lessons

20 total

1The Whiteboard HourUse a repeatable interview loop that moves from requirements and estimates to a sketch, focused deep dives, and explicit tradeoffs.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
2Requirements FirstTurn an ambiguous product prompt into functional, scale, data-retention, latency, consistency, and availability requirements.ProInteractiveConcept8 min20 XPOpen
3Scope RuthlesslyDefine a one-hour design scope by committing to core user paths and naming excluded features.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
4Napkin: Users to RPSConvert daily users and actions into peak requests per second with a peak factor and stated rounding convention.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
5Napkin: Yearly StorageEstimate one year of object-storage growth from daily volume and object size using decimal units.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
6Napkin: BandwidthEstimate peak egress bandwidth by combining delivery rate with average response size in decimal gigabytes per second.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
7The Ten-Minute SketchBuild a high-level parking-availability design with distinct sensor-update, durable-state, cached-read, and driver-query paths.ProDiagramConcept10 min20 XPOpen
8Narrate the SketchNarrate one write and one read through a design while naming durability, bounded staleness, and overload controls.ProInteractiveConcept8 min20 XPOpen
9Deep Dive: The DataDerive keys and read indexes from hot access paths and state which cross-partition operations become expensive.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
10Deep Dive: The Hot PathShorten a latency-critical read path with caching, asynchronous side work, and explicit budgets for synchronous dependencies.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
11The Follow-Up GauntletMap traffic growth, regional failure, and abuse follow-ups to capacity, failure-domain, and edge-admission changes.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
12Tradeoffs, Out LoudCompare both costs and benefits of fan-out strategies, then commit based on follower distribution and read frequency.ProInteractiveConcept8 min20 XPOpen
13Mock One: Ride ETASet Ride ETA location-update cadence from the required freshness while accounting for driver battery and bandwidth.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
14Mock One: The BlueprintDesign Ride ETA so one location stream feeds independent persistence and realtime delivery while reads use durable locations and an ETA cache.ProDiagramProject10 min20 XPOpen
15Mock One: The TwistsAdapt Ride ETA for bursts, offline drivers, and battery pressure with bounded buffering, reconciliation, and variable update cadence.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
16Mock Two: The Flash SalePrioritize a flash sale’s scarce-inventory invariant while accounting for burst admission, adversarial clients, and payment retries.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
17Mock Two: The BlueprintDesign a flash-sale purchase path with bounded admission, queued checkout, atomic inventory holds, and durable payment idempotency.ProDiagramProject10 min20 XPOpen
18Mock Two: The TwistsMap overselling, bot pressure, and duplicate payment attempts to atomic holds, identity-aware admission, and stable idempotency keys.ProInteractiveConcept7 min20 XPOpen
19The Story of Your DesignCompose a complete design narrative from clarified requirements and estimates through request paths, data choices, failures, and a deciding tradeoff.ProInteractiveConcept8 min20 XPOpen
20The Launch ReviewIntegrate admission control, redundant routing, cached inventory, failover-safe holds, payment idempotency, and outbox-to-queue publication into a launch-ready purchase path.ProDiagramCapstone12 min80 XPOpen