Square/Block Hotel Booking Suggestions
Hey everyone! Question for anyone who’s really good at system design: I have a final round interview with Square this week for a senior frontend role. I’ll be asked to design a Hotel Booking system. Do you guys have any suggestions on things to point out or areas of the design that may be more important than others? My thoughts were structured in this manner: requirements, component architecture, data model, where to fetch data, api methods, performance optimizations (image file types, compression, windowing/react virtualized), internationalization & accessibility. (i’ve watched the popular frontend system design videos on youtube and felt his breakdowns were super useful for overall structure) TC: 240 YOE: 7 Any and all help is appreciated!
For FE I was asked - search for available rooms, make a room reservation ( handling waiting for others for the same room during booking). Second scenario was little tough unless you know how its managed on the client side
thanks those r good callouts! i feel like searching for available rooms isn’t tough, that handling others waiting situation sounds like when a hotel website has like “your room is being held for MM:SS”. fun to solve
Think about distribution and b how the system will talk to a gds
Ironically we don’t have a hotel booking solution for POS do we?
Don't spread yourself too thin. The time will fly by quickly and you don't want to end up with an extremely shallow design by just going over table stakes across the whole stack. You want to be able to get into the weeds in a particular perspective of the problem. Play to your strengths, confirm your assumptions, and work with your interviewer to scale up the problem space. If it's a FE-oriented interview, focus on the user experience and ensure you're designing something that will be able to take the user through the whole flow. The problem is surprisingly more complex than it seems on it's face.
excellent advice! yeah i will definitely maintain focus on the user experience and optimize usability and UI performance
Not sure if you had it already, but something that helped me was design for single hotel booking first. Don’t jump the gun and begin designing for an Expedia/Airbnb style system
Hey, how was your interview ? Also in the pair programming rounds did you had to do LC style questions ?
waiting to hear the final feedback. No LC style just problem solving with javascript + frontend questions (frontend loop)
The frontend screen is pretty different. No algo leetcode stuff typically. You're offered a simple vanilla JS app and expected to fix a couple bugs and add some new functionality. Pay attention to the existing code and be able to adapt it.
How do you know they will ask you that topic
recruiter told me already, and it’s in the email schedule
That’s the only design question we ask