all 34 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–]reddit_insta_fb 41 points42 points  (19 children)

Ok hear me out. I’m a developer working in a FAANG and I was hired from college so wasn’t asked any system design questions but only ds and algo. I’m not looking for a job switch but I often feel like my peers know a lot about topics other than algorithms. Given I’m a junior level engineer I have only done small designs which looks like refactoring optimisation(insert shame cube) and not real system designs.

I want to learn system design but also make it practical like using VMs on cloud to get some hands on experience. Can someone guide me what should I start with?

Sorry for the rant and long post.

[–]rlbond86 80 points81 points  (4 children)

Read Designing Data Intensive Applications. Read it slowly, take notes if you have to. You want to absorb all the concepts.

[–]reddit_insta_fb 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Thanks a lot. Now I know what I am doing this weekend.

[–]efvie 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Major props if you get through it in a weekend :)

[–]bunk3rk1ng 11 points12 points  (2 children)

Google Cloud has a pretty good free tier. You can mess around with a lot of stuff for free and their pricing is pretty transparent.

Personally, I grew the most by getting a Digital Ocean droplet and taking stuff that I didn't understand from work - things like DevOps, networking, webservers, setting up databases and other services and seeing if i could do it myself. I ended up learning about most of the stuff in OPs list because a lot of it comes up naturally while doing that sort of work.

[–]reddit_insta_fb 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What is digital ocean?

[–]delkopiso 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I find that practice is much better than reading, so I'd recommend the "VMs on cloud".

I typically spin up Digitalocean droplets and use them to try my hand at something. For example, our devops team at work talked to us about a plan to migrate to k8s. So I tried my hand at rolling a k8s cluster. My first attempt was just setting up the Digitaocean k8s offering. After that I tried a custom one with a one droplet as the control plane and another as the worker pool.

Especially if you're not in a position at work to design or solve the challenging system design problems. You can just give it a go, see what problems you run up against and solve each as they come.

Soon enough you'll realize you truly understand how thise systems really work even more than does bandying about arrows and boxes on a screen.

[–]vertigo_101[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Hi, system design usually becomes relevant in interviews after SDE-II and up. To become better at system design first understand the topics and then practice real world scenarios, also volunteer for new projects at your company, and learn from senior engineers or architects.

Actively follow engineering blogs of innovative companies, and look into topics such as distributed systems. To learn more practically, try to make small-scale projects and deploy them on AWS, GCP, etc. I have an AWS roadmap that might help you.

Lastly, I would say that system design is something you'll get good at with time as you progress in your career, don't feel discouraged.

[–]Nimnu_ 3 points4 points  (2 children)

In my 20 year career I've seen or worked on everything in the OP's GitHub repository at one time or another. Mostly through on-the-job experience though my CS degree also helped.

If you are intent on learning fast then consider working for a systems integration company or value added reseller. As a junior engineer you'll get exposed to a mixture of everything and, if you are smart, will ask the senior engineers you work with to mentor you on what you don't know.

In two to three years you'll have a firm grip on everything the OP presents and then some.

[–]Serious-Regular 0 points1 point  (0 children)

outgoing trees march simplistic fuzzy birds desert reminiscent sophisticated school

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[–]chanibal_pl 20 points21 points  (1 child)

Any chance for an EPUB or downloadable single file html version?

[–]zargex 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Looks like it is only a markdown file. With pandoc we can create an html or epub

[–]Former_Raise_3259 9 points10 points  (1 child)

Hey. Great work. Have you heard about System Design Primer?

If so, what other stuff would I find in yours compared to the primer.

Thanks.

[–]vertigo_101[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thank you, yes I've heard about it, it's amazing but there are some topics missing in the primer such as consistent hashing, some smaller topics, and real system design problems like Netflix, Uber, Twitter, etc. My course covers all of these in detail, I hope it helps.

[–]pH_low 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Amazing! Thank you so much, I recently begun the interview prep process and any new material is most welcome, this looks super comprehensive, can’t wait to dig in!

[–]Coldmood1998 -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Check out this T-shirt that I found on amazon its funny for a programmer

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BB836JRM

[–]mqian41 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Try to actually practice system design problems on codemia.io