Technology

Complete guide to understanding system design interviews, what interviewers expect, and how to prepare effectively for distributed systems and scalability questions.

What is Homebrew? Homebrew is a package manager for MacOS and Linux systems. Although it is called homebrew, the command is shortened to brew. The thing about homebrew is that every command and option sticks to the theme of brewing. I haven’t gone and dug out why this is the case, but I found it amusing. As I had used homebrew a couple of times when setting up my work laptop and now setting up my own, I got curious and wanted to know what options the command accepted. The brewery terminology also was intriguing. ...

Background So you got your brand new MacBook Pro. And now you are dreading the time you are going to spend setting it all up. I was. It is a time sink. So I made a little guide that is selfishly for myself in the future if I were to format this one or buy another one. Someday I’ll script it all as a brew bundle and just install it. ...

Most good organisations expect their engineering hires to have gone through a system design interview. For a vast majority of people this might sound like a weird thing to do as most people don’t individually design large scale systems. So expecting someone to design a highly scalable and available system in less than 60 minutes is a daunting task. We must also consider the fact that not everyone gets to work in organisations that build large scale distributed systems. I think the time when I worked in FactSet was when I dealt with extremely large volumes of data and we focussed on the performance of queries from the database to sub 5 ms in order to ensure that even with latency, users would be able to see their graphs plotted in a second or so. Most applications wouldn’t really care about performance at that level because for their line business it probably doesn’t matter that much. ...