How did you learn System Design?
I recently completed Neetcode system design course and I feel that it gave me a very basic level understanding of System Design which I mostly already had from my masters course. I tried watching the Youtube videos of Jordan, the Russian dude but I feel they are too complicated for me. How did you learn system design when you started out? Do I buy educative? I have DDIA but it's way too long. Do I learn the concepts first and then start watching interview questions? Teach me senpai!
Best way imo is to have hands on experience and relate that to solving system design problems
Yeah but I don't think I will get to experience working with Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Kafka in my job so no way I am going to get to learnt that.
The vast majority of software engineers DO NOT get to build Facebook or Twitter or WhatsApp or YouTube so pretty safe to say hands on experience on those is impossible. Leetcode itself does not capture your breadth of knowledge and ability to see how real life systems work hence companies have made system design mandatory. This means the only way to ace it is to expand your knowledge of existing systems. Hands on experience is good but never going to be enough
Grokking is sufficient to cover the basics. Practice writing out the requirements and diagramming some of their examples like you would in a real interview. Then do a paid mock and pay close attention to the feedback. Read up on tech blogs and Google around for any areas where you felt least comfortable during the mock. Then do another mock. Rinse and repeat until you feel comfortable.
Any good place to get mocks from?
Meetapro or interviewingio
So wait, you don't learn from some resources because they're too hard for you?
And didnt read ddia cuz "it's too long". Fucking Lmao 😹
I’d say just do it with a couple practice projects and learn. With AWS free tier forever you can explore a whole slew of topics hands on. Even things like caching you can spin up a Redis docker container and poke around. At a certain level you will need hands on experience, just cleared an Amazon interview and most of the system design Q’s thrown at me were why I picked a specific solution type, you won’t be able to answer those by regurgitating something you’ve memorized. I do really like Jordan’s videos but you can tell they’re from somebody who knows a lot of the theory but hasn’t really had to implement it.
I watch a lot of system design videos. Same topic from 2-3 channels and see how they implement it. It’s time consuming though. But still better than reading.
See Alex Yu's System Design Interview book. After that go back to Russian dude, DDIA and Jordan (in that order)
Lol. Jordan is just a L3 who just speaks what he has memorized.
He's quite popular on Blind.
So he’s no good? What about System Design Fight Club?