What to Expect

Objectives

This course will give you actionable tips and best practices for performing well in System Design Interviews.

After this course, you will know how to:

• Demonstrate your knowledge to the interviewers.

• Communicate to show you’re a great addition to a team.

• Perform according to the expectations of the role you’re applying for.

• Manage your time, and complete a design under a time crunch.

• Tackle a problem you’ve never seen before.

• Simulate real-world design processes in under 45 minutes.

Together with a strong fluency in distributed systems and System Design fundamentals, this course will prepare you for success in your System Design Interviews.

A note on technical scope

This course is unique because it focuses almost exclusively on the soft skills (or people skills) you need in order to perform well in the System Design Interview. While we will provide a high-level overview of distributed systems and System Design, we won’t explain these topics in-depth, as that level of detail is outside the scope of this course’s core learning objectives.

This course will be most beneficial for those who have a basic understanding of the following:

• Distributed systems—The principal techniques used to develop highly functional, scalable, and available systems hosted on separate, networked devices.

• Programming fundamentals—An algorithmic approach toward problem-solving and the basic concepts concerning computer programming languages.

• Modern web architecture—The fundamentals for designing and developing a web application by introducing different web components and architectural styles.

This course is an excellent precursor or supplementary resource to other System Design or System Design Interview courses.

That said, everyone is different. If at any point you feel a gap in technical knowledge is making it difficult to absorb this course’s material, consider pausing to learn some fundamentals of distributed systems and System Design and revisiting this course material afterward.

Note: To master System Design fundamentals and get practice designing 13 real-world problems, check out our comprehensive course, Grokking the Modern System Design Interview for Engineers & Managers.

Course structure

This course consists of four chapters. These chapters can be segmented into different sections, as shown below: