System Design

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Latest Episodes:

Dropbox Interview Feb 28, 2021

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.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_API
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/object-storage

Distributed Caches Feb 14, 2021

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-things-caching-use-cases-benefits-strategies-choosing-a-caching-technology-exploring-fa6c1f2e93aa
https://ieftimov.com/post/when-why-least-frequently-used-cache-implementation-golang/
https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer#cache
https://memcached.org/
https://redis.io/

Message Queues Dec 06, 2020

Wes and Kevin talk about message queues, the problems they solve, and how they work.

https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer

http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/

https://netflixtechblog.com/

https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-one-python.html

P.S., Wes learned how to edit podcasts better thanks to this guide - https://podigy.co/podcast-editing-guide/, hopefully this podcast has the best audio quality yet!

SQL vs noSQL Databases Oct 17, 2020

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-care
CAP theorem
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/cap-theorem
https://mwhittaker.github.io/blog/an_illustrated_proof_of_the_cap_theorem
Cool article explaining the problem with saying you can have 2 out of 3 properties of CAP
http://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-databases-cp-or-ap.html
MongoDB - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/introduction/

Facebook Timeline Interview Sep 15, 2020

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.
Helpful Links
RabbitMQ quick start documentation - https://www.rabbitmq.com/getstarted.html
Apache Kafka introductinon - https://kafka.apache.org/intro

Google Docs Interview Sep 14, 2020

In our first episode, Kevin gives Wes a mock interview on how to design google docs.
Helpful links
The git storage technique we referenced is described in detail here - https://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-vector-pt-1 (Note that this is not git, but the same technique applies)
Website with algorithm for merge conflict resolution - https://operational-transformation.github.io/

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