GitHub-friendly view of v15. Use the links below — GitHub renders Markdown natively. For search, tabs, and interview mode, open the interactive HTML.
- Requirements (3–5 min) — functional + NFRs, draw out-of-scope line
- Estimation — QPS, storage, bandwidth to justify decisions
- API design — REST / WebSocket / gRPC, name routes explicitly
- Data model — entities, SQL vs NoSQL with justification
- High-level design — client → LB → services → DB/cache
- Deep dives — 2–3 hardest problems, tradeoffs, failure modes
Architecture framework — skeleton → 2 questions → 5 archetypes (feed, transactional, real-time, marketplace, pipeline). Derive designs instead of memorizing them.
Key numbers: Redis ~100K–1M ops/s · Single DB ~10K–50K QPS · Kafka ~1M+ msgs/s · Cross-region ~100–200ms
Full interactive cheatsheet includes DB chooser, cloud commands, and estimation worksheet.
- Ticketmaster — seat booking
- WhatsApp — messaging
- FB News Feed
- Tinder — dating app
- LeetCode — coding platform
- Distributed rate limiter
- FB Live Comments
- FB Post Search
- Yelp — local search
- Strava — activity tracking
- Online auction (eBay)
- Price tracking (CamelCamelCamel)
- Notification system (APNs/FCM)
- Search autocomplete (Google)
- Unique ID generator (Snowflake)
- Hotel reservation (Booking.com)
- Gaming leaderboard
- S3 object storage
- Instagram — photo sharing
- YouTube Top K videos
- Uber — ride-sharing
- Robinhood — stock trading
- Google Docs — collaborative editing
- Distributed cache (Redis-like)
- YouTube — video platform
- Web crawler
- Ad click aggregator
- Job scheduler (Airflow)
- Payment system (Stripe)
- Metrics monitoring (Datadog)
- Message queue (Kafka)
- Distributed key-value store
- Nearby friends
- Google Maps
- Distributed email (Gmail)
- Digital wallet (Apple Pay)