I have some interview appointments from some big companies. Along with the algorithms and problem solving that I'm brushing up on, I'm also looking at system design materials. But I'm still green on this area and there are a lot of topics to be covered, any suggestions of what topics or materials should I focused on? What makes a successful system design interviews, especially for the ones that has little or no experience like me? Would one still be hired if he had a bad system design interview? Also is there any apps, tools, about distributed systems that I can get my hands dirty and start implementing one for experience, or any virtual tools for distributed systems? Buying multiple servers for fun aint cheap for a person like me but on the other hand I want to put something on my resume and my skillset to show companies that I have some experience. I apologize if some of my questions are vague and and hopefully with more discussions I can respond with better questions / answers.
Depends on which company to interview. FB focuses on different system than Airbnb for eg.
Read āDesigning Data Intensive Applicationsā
How is Grokking the system design interview ?
I bought this. The overview and steps are good. Gave me a structured approach to answering these questions. The actual problem solutions are severely lacking. They quote the same paragraph from the theory section applied to every problem. Does not go into depth about any topics.
My suggestion would be to start with http://blog.gainlo.co/index.php/category/system-design-interview-questions/ Second stop would be https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer If you are interested to know how some of the highly used apps are built, highscalability is where you want to go. Besides the content in these, your experiene always comes helpful. Lastly practice, practice, practice... Good Luckšš¼
Thank you for sharing the links. Those were super helpful.
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