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System Design

Wes and Kevin
System Design
Latest episode

6 episodes

  • System Design

    Dropbox Interview

    2/28/2021 | 32 mins.
    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
  • System Design

    Distributed Caches

    2/14/2021 | 26 mins.
    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/
  • System Design

    Message Queues

    12/06/2020 | 31 mins.
    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!
  • System Design

    SQL vs noSQL Databases

    10/17/2020 | 30 mins.
    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/
  • System Design

    Facebook Timeline Interview

    9/16/2020 | 34 mins.
    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

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About 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 [email protected]
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