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 episode 2. We'd love to hear any listener feedback - email us at thesystemdesignpodcast@gmail.com
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=PE4gwstWhmchttps://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_APIhttps://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/object-storage
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-fa6c1f2e93aahttps://ieftimov.com/post/when-why-least-frequently-used-cache-implementation-golang/https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer#cachehttps://memcached.org/ https://redis.io/
Wes and Kevin talk about message queues, the problems they solve, and how they work. https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primerhttp://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/https://netflixtechblog.com/https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-one-python.htmlP.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!
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 theorem https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/cap-theoremhttps://mwhittaker.github.io/blog/an_illustrated_proof_of_the_cap_theoremCool article explaining the problem with saying you can have 2 out of 3 properties of CAPhttp://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-databases-cp-or-ap.htmlMongoDB - https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/introduction/
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 LinksRabbitMQ quick start documentation - https://www.rabbitmq.com/getstarted.htmlApache Kafka introductinon - https://kafka.apache.org/intro
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-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/