System Design

Software Engineers Wes Moncrief and Kevin Li discuss aspects of the system design interview, as well as related topics in designing large and interesting software architectures. If you're new here, I'd suggest starting with the episode "Facebook Timeline Interview". I'll also note that our first few episodes had lower quality audio than our subsequent episodes.We'd love to hear any listener feedback - email us at thesystemdesignpodcast@gmail.com

Episodes

Dropbox Interview

Kevin asks Wes to design Dropbox, with an emphasis on designing the data model and storage techniques to scale out.Helpful links:https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/design-dropbox-a-system-design-interview-question/https://www.you...

February 28, 2021 • 32:40

Distributed Caches

As Kevin prepares to start a new job at Instacart, he explains some ideas around how a company like Instacart could employ caching to improve the scalability of their services.Show notes:https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/all...

February 14, 2021 • 26:05

Message Queues

Wes and Kevin talk about message queues, the problems they solve, and how they work. https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer

December 06, 2020 • 31:07

SQL vs noSQL Databases

Breaking away from the interview format, Wes and Kevin deep dive into SQL vs noSQL databases.Show notes:ACID compliance - https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/acid-compliance-what-it-means-and-why-you-should-careCAP theore...

October 17, 2020 • Episode 3 • 30:14

Facebook Timeline Interview

Wes asks Kevin to design the Facebook/Twitter Timeline with an emphasis on scaling to a large number of users.I'd encourage you to pause where relevant to try to think through these designs yourself - it really helps the content sink in...

September 15, 2020 • Episode 2 • 34:24

Google Docs Interview

In our first episode, Kevin gives Wes a mock interview on how to design google docs. Helpful linksThe git storage technique we referenced is described in detail here - https://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-v...

September 14, 2020 • Episode 1 • 43:47