System Design Q&A and Videos

In his course, Alex mentioned that the system design used in practice at companies is very different from the system design studied for interviews.

There are books such as System Design Interview that are used for system design interviews. What's your take on the book?

Designing Data-Intensive Applications is another commonly cited book. What's your take on this book? What other good books you recommend to get better at system design in practice?

There are a few types of architectures floating everywhere such as domain- driven design, hexagonal architecture, event-driven architecture, microservices, etc. I know microservices is very well used in practice. What's your take on the usage of other architectures? They seem pretty abstract. Is learning them worth it?

I am trying to get better at System Design and trying to understand the design of various systems. I'm very curious about the System Design of Taro, and how Taro is built.

• What technologies are used for frontend and backend?
• What is the backend architecture used? What are the databases used?
• How are the videos streamed, payments handled, user logins handled?
• How does Taro scale with users and give a smooth experience?
• How is the platform optimized from the perspective of cloud costs?
• When the number of users on Taro increases by an order of magnitude, what are the changes to the architecture you would consider doing?
• Is the website built from scratch? Or are there any libraries and frameworks available to make it easier?
• Taro seems like a well-built platform with smooth user experience and a lot of features. I'm surprised that all of this built by just one engineer (Charlie). What's the secret sauce? What are the tradeoffs made to still make things work with less resources?
• What is the decision-making process that went into making all these decisions?

I'm looking to build a social media mobile app (similar in flavor to LinkedIn but for a different use case) and considering various options. With some google search, I found that Flutter is faster than React native, but Flutter has less number of packages available. I didn't use Flutter before.

• What classes of features are much harder to build in Flutter than React native or vice-versa?
• In your experience, how fast is Flutter when compared to React native?

Recently, Alex mentioned that Facebook has deprecated React native internally inside Meta and is now using only native mobile development for all Meta applications. So, I'm wondering the reason behind this.

• How fast are native mobile apps when compared to react native/flutter apps?
• Do native mobile apps inherently support some more features (like running ML models on-device?) that react native/flutter apps can't support?
• Is it preferrable to use react native/flutter until the app reaches a certain scale and then switch to native mobile development?
• What's your rationale behind choosing between these options?

Hey Folks, I have a System Design Interview with Figma. Is there some fundamental material that I can start from?

I am good at Systems design. It comes very naturally to me when compared to DSA in that I exhibit systems-level holistic thinking.

Could this be an indication that I should play up to my strenghts and think about becoming a Product manager or architect as opposed to struggling being a developer?

Recruiters often mention that a staff engineer interview involves a deeper dive compared to a senior software engineer interview, but it's not clear how much deeper it needs to go. Are there any resources that can clarify this?

I recently designed APIs for a new project. While I am very confident in the design I have developed. But I get some jitters when I plan to do readouts to leadership.
Is it because of the questions I would get? is it because I would like dumb?

is it because folks would look down upon me? What is it I wonder.

Any inputs folks?

Question: This may seem like a dumb question but, doesn't a technical person administer technical interviews (coding / whiteboarding and systems design)?

So I had a behavioral screen with Meta some time ago and the in-house non-technical recruiter to my surprise oddly asked me a systems design question (I was expected to answer in like 5-15 minutes max which made no sense), I get that they want to get an idea of the candidate's 'product sense,' but I found it quite odd.

Recently, I came across another software engineering coaching platform I joined and went to their practice of DSA and system design interview prep sessions which they run weekly, which oddly I found that non-technical admins (executive assistants) ran, I think it was helpful for offloading administrative scheduling, but they didn't seem to help much since they're actually non-technical.

Can someone be able to give me specific feedback on how i should improve? the recruiter wasn't able to do so.

here's the design i came up with, he specifically didn't want to discuss uploading of movies only streaming, recommendations, user management

many thanks in advance!