URL Shortener
Design TinyURL. Focus on hashing, collision handling, and analytics.
System Design Interview Preparation
System design interviews test your ability to architect scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems. Unlike coding rounds, there’s no single “correct” answer—what matters is your structured thinking, trade-off analysis, and communication.
Featured Resources
Section titled “Featured Resources”Hello Interview
Section titled “Hello Interview”A modern, structured platform specifically designed for system design interview preparation. Combines written guides with video walkthroughs for comprehensive learning.
Hello Interview — Website Comprehensive system design courses with structured learning paths, real interview problems, and detailed solutions.
Hello Interview — YouTube Video walkthroughs of system design problems. Watch experienced engineers think through complex architectures.
Core Concepts to Master
Section titled “Core Concepts to Master”- Load Balancing — Distribute traffic across servers (Round Robin, Least Connections, Consistent Hashing)
- Caching — Reduce latency and database load (Redis, Memcached, CDN caching)
- Database Design — SQL vs NoSQL, sharding, replication, indexing strategies
- Message Queues — Decouple services, handle async processing (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS)
- Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling — When to add more machines vs. beefier hardware
- CAP Theorem — Consistency, Availability, Partition Tolerance trade-offs
- Microservices — Service decomposition, API gateways, service discovery
- Rate Limiting — Protect services from abuse (Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket)
- Redundancy — Eliminate single points of failure
- Failover Strategies — Active-passive, active-active, DNS failover
- Circuit Breakers — Prevent cascade failures in distributed systems
- Monitoring & Alerting — Metrics, logs, traces (the three pillars of observability)
Classic Problems to Practice
Section titled “Classic Problems to Practice”Rate Limiter
Protect APIs from abuse. Explore token bucket and sliding window algorithms.
Chat System
Design WhatsApp/Slack. WebSockets, message ordering, and presence.
News Feed
Design Facebook/Twitter feed. Fan-out strategies, ranking algorithms.
Video Streaming
Design YouTube/Netflix. CDNs, adaptive bitrate, and chunked encoding.
Search Autocomplete
Design Google Search suggestions. Tries, prefix matching, and ranking.