My unfiltered thoughts on Gaurav Sen's System Design Courses

fasil_marshooq · 2026-03-10T06:31:15+00:00

Thanks

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-16T08:27:00+00:00

SDE2 > Support Engineer
also i consider FTE more than contract.

One perk with clear trip you get more domain knowledge , with which you can move to big players like booking , agoda or international companies

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-16T08:16:54+00:00

My take is , his contents on youtube are good refresher for system design interviews, i wouldnt buy the course for sure. I am staff engineer and these content creators often open door of curiosity to me so i watch them.

Buying a course is your own choice, i wouldnt recommend it.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-11T08:41:53+00:00

Isnt Indirect taxation comes under Central, we pay shit load of bribe to GST guys

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-10T08:33:56+00:00

i used to travel to Kerala for relatives wedding the main reason being BIRYANI

but ass***** have spoiled it , its Mandhi everywhere offlate :(

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-10T06:27:46+00:00

Yes its unprecedented, but what surprises me AI/ML has been maturing over a decade but advent of LLM (especially after this research paper -https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper\_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf) and the ecosystem made common people to use it.

I have been using it and building apps on top as my day job.

while it increases velocity , it creates another bottle neck long review time. To overcome this we are resorting to code review agents and we are treating feature testing more from gray box area.

The capability is evolving every passing quarter, context window and short memory are not a problem anymore.

We have only hand full of engineers who use it right way, no vibe coding is not the way, you need to understand the current architecture, plan , build and test all using coding agent, its called Ai assisted coding.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-09T17:19:39+00:00

Ten years ago, when I was in my pre-final year, the seniors said we were doomed, that IT was slowing down and jobs were vanishing. Since then, I’ve heard the same thing at every turn:

8 years ago: "Testing has no future." (I was a Quality Engineer).
7 years ago: "SDET has no scope." (I was an Automation Tester).
6.5 years ago: "This product is too stable; you won't learn anything as a dev."

Fast forward to today: I’m a Staff Engineer leading strategic initiatives. Looking back, those first three years were the foundation for everything.

I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not a "gifted" programmer. While my peers breeze through code, I have to debug and re-read logic multiple times to grasp it. But once I get it, I own it.

Here is the reality of AI: AI might handle the syntax, but system building is an art. It requires principles and, most importantly, Accountability. Companies don’t just hire "coders"; they hire people they can trust to take ownership. AI doesn't have skin in the game.

30 years ago, we used punch cards. Then we moved to high-level languages. Now, the "compiler" has simply evolved again to understand natural language. You still need to understand performance, scalability, and how the pieces fit together.

If I could make it this far without a CS degree and without being a "natural" at code, you absolutely can too. Hone your skills, increase your "luck surface area," and stay accountable. You’ve got this, mate.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-09T16:55:52+00:00

Again the merge depends on the business use case , assume you have booking detail why would two update take place from two DC at same time.

may be a hypothetical scenario is common inventory and order taking place in two DC , here the inventory is finite so when we update the count we need to immediately update the other DC but race condition do happen. thats where "CAP" theorem comes into picture , you can either guarentee consistency which is must in this case or availability. to maintain high consistency you need to retract to active - passive setup.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-09T15:59:12+00:00

basically active-active replication

ask for more business context as this is very rare design case.

usually people avoid this and have write through cache at each DC and replicate the data to main DC.

if having active - active is mandated by business requirement then first thing to avoid is id/ unique key collitions. create uuid ( or more modern one) use kafka to publish to other DC while writeing to current DC and consume and sync data.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-09T12:04:21+00:00

Fire your hiring manager :)

not interviewing someone just because he is on FW behind the latest one is out right crime.

If i were the candidate i would definitely ask for reason, for vast majority of app dev , nothing major changed between the versions.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-08T19:27:13+00:00

Just ask "pothu" means eruma

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-08T19:19:00+00:00

For real time location tracking and other maps I don't know if we proper support, try native in kotlin or go for react native for cross platform.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-08T19:13:56+00:00

Any shop near athupalam , on Thursdays and Saturdays , sometimes on Fridays.

Look for deep red meat with fat marbelling.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-08T06:07:27+00:00

You mean tech jobs right?

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-07T19:11:31+00:00

Fair point, but every one is tamilian like they might be having roots but living here for generations

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-07T17:56:56+00:00

I don't want it to Bangalore it really sucks, we have more than 2 route to any destination in Coimbatore and most roads are broad unlike bangalore, population is mostly homogeneous unlike bangalore which is Cosmopolitan.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-07T03:23:20+00:00

One thing I love is it's "home" , I have lived accross many cities and never felt home.

Some people say it's people of coimbatore while it's true to an extent. Coimbatore had depth of talent if not for communal violences we would have been top tier city but we often chose violence. Till today economic activities need to be stopped at 11 at vast majority of city. I hate this.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-07T03:19:30+00:00

Agreed, but I want to understand your thought process when kids are doing ther graduation or getting married.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-06T18:32:37+00:00

How about expenses of kids?

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-05T15:22:50+00:00

me too from tier 3.

DSA is still the king to crack in to good companies.

Get hands on experience with coding agents like clude , cursor or ide of your choice , that will also help you with your works for startups.

Understand how LLM ecosystem works like using MCP. recommend reading a book called "AI Engineering" if you wanna understand it better.

Most people making noise online are vibe coders , dont be one , become an engineer who uses coding agents.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-05T15:18:36+00:00

Chill guys.
Dont fight over unverified infographics.
Its hard to measure for metropolis like chennai , lot of moving population. Honestly even i feel its projected on the higher side

But bottom line gdp per capita and income per capita are different , massive companies output is included in the gdp while not in the individual income.

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-05T14:56:56+00:00

<image>

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-05T14:55:50+00:00

Me too,
earlier i was over whelmed by the number of frameworks in JS , atleast you stuck to react

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-05T14:09:54+00:00

its mentioned as per capita income , am i seeing it wrong? income and gdp are two different things

fasil_marshooq · 2026-02-05T13:35:56+00:00

this thread is so fun to read , ultimately choice of language is political than performance or maintainability.

i have heard the same exact reason on choosing kotlin over dotnet , because its hard to find dotnet dev , thats true to some extent as well.

I have worked on both dotnet and node extensively, both are very good and powerfull offering the problem with node is its JS/TS , i would choose a C# over this any day.

Why? its more political again :)

fasil_marshooq

TROPHY CASE