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

System Design

Dropbox Interview

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/

Distributed Caches

Wes and Kevin talk about message queues, the problems they solve, and how they work. <a href='https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer'>https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer</a><a href='http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/'>http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/</a><a href='https://netflixtechblog.com/'>https://netflixtechblog.com/</a><a href='https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-one-python.html'>https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-one-python.html</a> P.S., Wes learned how to edit podcasts better thanks to this guide - <a href='https://podigy.co/podcast-editing-guide/'>https://podigy.co/podcast-editing-guide/</a>, hopefully this podcast has the best audio quality yet!

Message Queues

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/

Wes and Kevin

System Design by Wes and Kevin

Episodes