Systems Design Primer is total junk

Meta
CuckerBerg

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CuckerBerg
Mar 6 6 Comments

The Donne Martin one. Going through this to fill in gaps after DDIA. You can tell it was cobbled together by someone who doesn’t have full command of the material: disparate/contradictory blurbs copy pasted from elsewhere, zero nuance suggested (e.g. doesn’t even mention Read Your Write and other need-to-know problems). Often the little info provided doesn’t even make sense and I need to read up on Google to reconcile information. Reads like a lazy college student’s (who doesn’t really grasp the material) cheat sheet.

Just putting this out there to find as people search Blind for SD resources

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TOP 6 Comments
  • Yeah… I think interviews are just broken beyond repair at this point. “Design this system you’ve never actually used in 20 minutes” is just as much BS as leetcode. Good luck reading a bunch of articles about how complicated systems are implemented at various companies, because I think that’s kind of where we’re at right now.

    Edit: here’s an example of something I needed to know in a mock interview that wasn’t covered by design primer.

    https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/asynchronous-task-scheduling-at-dropbox
    Mar 6 2
    • Meta / Eng
      Cass1234

      Go to company page Meta Eng

      Cass1234
      Btw, the pattern you have described is fairly standard in job schedulers. The 10k task scale is nothing. FB’s Infra schedulers do 10x that especially the ones that manage containers
      Mar 6
    • That makes sense. It helped me understand how task queues work a lot better because the design primer’s bit on task queues was like 3 sentences, which wasn’t very helpful:

      Tasks queues receive tasks and their related data, runs them, then delivers their results. They can support scheduling and can be used to run computationally-intensive jobs in the background.

      Celery has support for scheduling and primarily has python support.
      Mar 6
  • LinkedIn
    forevercan

    Go to company page LinkedIn

    forevercan
    It really depends. If getting a job offer is the goal - then it suffices imo. I was able to get a bunch of offers relying upon it as primary source material (of course my own experience plays as much of a part). Depending on that material for actually learning about distributed systems/infrastructure is probably not the right usecase, and the complete lack of structure proves that point.
    Mar 6 0
  • Meta / Eng
    Cass1234

    Go to company page Meta Eng

    Cass1234
    DDIA is the bible of sorts but experience is invaluable.
    Mar 6 0
  • Amazon
    nnjiyh

    Go to company page Amazon

    nnjiyh
    What’s a good resource ?
    Mar 6 0