Mastering System Design Interviews: Beginner to Advanced

• The course is structured around career growth and interview preparation

• Will talk about the interview process and provide a 12 month roadmap for job change

• Will discuss the difference between career growth and interview preparation

• Will focus on the concept of systems and core ideas to be aware of before a system design interview

• Will also dive deep into the components involved in system design

• From a preparation perspective, first three months will be focused on building foundational knowledge

• Course is meant to be taken from a long-term perspective, with emphasis on concepts rather than specific frameworks or APIs.

The instructor introduces themselves, providing background on their career in the software industry, including experience working at various stages of startups and with different types of companies, such as both services and product companies, and in different domains, such as distributed systems. The instructor also notes that their experience may differ from the typical "big tech" experience and encourages students to keep an open mind and ask questions in the Q&A forum.

• Why does this course take a fundamental-based approach rather than a trend-based approach?

• How does faking expertise not work in system design interviews?

• How does this course prepare you to crack an interview on your own skills?

• How does this course focus on the preparation roadmap?

• How is clearing a system design interview different from career growth?

• How should one approach the information shared in this course?

• How does this course prepare you to work in a company other than big tech?

• What is the promise of this course?

• How will this course help the learner in their career?

• Why is the course presented in a minimalistic way in terms of graphics and diagrams?

This lecture is discussing the unpredictable nature of system design interviews and how to approach them. The author suggests that in order to be successful in a system design interview, one should view software as a business and understand the importance of algorithms, data structures, and problem-solving in relation to software engineering and product development. They also mention that it's important to have a basic understanding of software engineering and the domains in which you are working.

• The fundamentals of business are based on five parameters and system design. Interviews will test you on four of them: algorithms, data structures, the domain, and infrastructure.

• The management aspect of things will be kept out of system design interviews.

• It is important to understand the expectations of the role and the interviewer in the conversation and to construct the conversation for better chances of success.

• The four things that will define how well the conversation is going are algorithms, data structures, the domain, and infrastructure.

• During a system design interview, it is important to listen with the intent to understand, not to reply and to shape questions based on what information is missing.

• The conversation can be broken down into four phases: Question asked, Discussion, Design, and Validation.

• The lecture covers six basic questions or pivots of the discussion during a system design interview

• These questions will be covered in more depth in upcoming lectures

• The goal of the interview is to convert the abstract discussion into a positive outcome

• The six tracks are: what problem is the system solving, what are the components needed to solve the problem, how will the system handle scalability, what technology and infrastructure will be used, what are the tradeoffs and constraints, and what is the plan for testing and maintenance.

• The first question to consider is what problem the system is solving and what the expectation from the system is.

• The second question is to identify the components needed to solve the problem.

• High level design is the link between the problem and its materialization into a reality.

The lecture is discussing five major categories of software systems that constitute the majority of systems used by developers and serve users in some form. The categories include systems that gather information, systems that store information, systems that process information, systems that act on information, and systems that present information. The lecture explains that each category serves a specific purpose and that narrowing down the scope of the systems discussed is helpful for general conversation and system design interviews.

• What are the basic technology components needed to solve the problem?

• What is the MVP?

• When should the basic wireframe of the system be ready?

• What is the importance of achieving MVP early?

• What should be the focus when building the MVP?

• What should be avoided when building the MVP?

• How soon should one think about scaling after achieving MVP?

• What should be considered before scaling?

• What is the security aspect of data and why is it important to bring it up in a system design interview?

• How does understanding the difference between authentication and authorization affect the design of a system?

• How does schema design impact the storage technology and scaling aspect of a system?

• Why should schema design be a perfect fit for the solution, instead of memorizing specific data models?

• How to approach the conversation about schema design in a system design interview?

The lecture is about the importance of recovery and fault tolerance in cloud design and how they are interdependent. The lecture explains how failure is inevitable and recovery is about how well and gracefully a system can recover from it. The lecture also mentions how recovery is different from fault tolerance, which is about the ability of the system to handle errors and faulty data. The lecture also emphasizes the importance of proactively bringing up the topics of recovery and fault tolerance in system design discussions.

The final question in the lecture is what each component in a design is going to do to its data and how it will achieve it. The fundamentals of this question are organized as data structures. The lecture mentions that the basic data structures are mostly packaged with the language and the secondary data structures that one should pay attention to are LRU, LFU, Trie, Graph, Tree, Heap, and Priority Queue. From an algorithm's perspective, searching and sorting will take precedence but esoteric algorithms will not play a major role in system design interviews as there is more focus on infrastructure and design. In this context, mention of algorithms such as merge sort is only a passing mention.

• What is the purpose of the lecture?

• What systems are being consolidated?

• Why is the lecture not going too deep into each system?

• What are some examples of company uses for these systems?

• What will be included in the assignments section?

• What are examples of content management systems?

• What are examples of messaging or chat applications?

• What are examples of social media portals?

• What is a search engine and what components does it consist of?

• What is an information aggregation system and what are some examples of it?

The lecture focuses on how to ensure that whatever is learned for the system design interview is actually becoming part of one's career growth. The speaker suggests that the best way to start learning a new framework is to compile it from the source, as this allows one to learn about the dependencies and its interaction with the ecosystem and operating system. They also suggest debugging frameworks at every possible level and listening to the traffic of browsing sessions to learn about network traffic and different portals.

This section will discuss the various aspects of the interview process, including the variable aspects such as the duration, location, and types of rounds, as well as expertise and vulnerability, supply and demand, and burnout. It will delve into the different types of vulnerabilities, such as domain-based, framework-based, and language-based, and how competition shapes around them. The section will also examine the latest trends in the job application process and how to avoid burnout during the preparation process.