Interview prep guides
- AI-Assisted Coding Interviews: What They Test and How to Prepare: How the AI-assisted coding round works, what interviewers grade, the six ways candidates fail it, a worked example, and a practice plan.
- Back-of-the-Envelope Estimation for System Design Interviews: The handful of numbers and shortcuts you need for system design estimates: QPS, storage, bandwidth and latency, with worked examples and the mistakes interviewers notice.
- Caching in System Design Interviews: Patterns, Invalidation and Failure Modes: Cache-aside, read-through, write-through and write-back compared, plus eviction, invalidation races, cache stampedes and hot keys: what to say when an interviewer asks "where would you cache?"
- Consistent Hashing Explained for System Design Interviews: Why hash mod N breaks when servers change, how a consistent hash ring fixes it, why virtual nodes matter, how replication works on the ring, and when to mention alternatives.
- Design a Rate Limiter: Algorithms, Trade-offs and the Distributed Version: Token bucket, leaky bucket, fixed and sliding windows compared, then how to run a rate limiter across many servers with Redis, and what interviewers push on.
- Design a URL Shortener: Estimates, ID Generation, Redirects and Scale: A complete walkthrough of the URL shortener interview question: requirements, estimates, three ways to generate short codes, 301 vs 302, caching, and the follow-ups interviewers ask.
- Low-Level Design (LLD) Interviews: A Step-by-Step Approach: How to approach LLD and machine-coding interviews: clarify, find entities, define interfaces, apply patterns only where they earn their place, and handle concurrency. Worked through a parking lot.
- Message Queues in System Design Interviews: When, Which and How: When to add a queue, queues vs logs (SQS/RabbitMQ vs Kafka), delivery guarantees, ordering, idempotent consumers, dead-letter queues and the outbox pattern.
- How to Structure a 45-Minute System Design Interview: A minute-by-minute framework for system design interviews: requirements, estimates, API, data model, high-level design, deep dives and wrap-up, with the mistakes to avoid.