System Design articles
Focused reading for candidates preparing stronger examples, sharper technical stories, and more credible interview answers.
One Storytelling Technique That Makes You Stand Out in Every System Design Interview
A short, practical guide to using real-world operational analogies to explain distributed systems clearly in system design interviews.
The Ultimate System Design Mental Model: Mapping Real-World Problems to Technologies
A book-style system design guide that maps real operational bottlenecks to technologies like Redis, Kafka, WebSockets, object storage, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, DynamoDB, CDNs, API gateways, retries, and observability.
Normal Engineers vs Experienced Engineers in System Design Interviews
A short, memorable guide showing how experienced engineers stand out in system design interviews through tradeoffs, failure handling, operational maturity, and business-aware communication.
MongoDB vs Cassandra vs DynamoDB: The NoSQL Decision Engineers Never Forget
A story-driven guide to choosing between MongoDB, Cassandra, and DynamoDB in senior backend and system design interviews, built around mental models, production tradeoffs, and real-world scaling examples.
MongoDB vs Cassandra: How to Choose the Right Database in System Design Interviews
A practical, story-driven guide to choosing MongoDB vs Cassandra in system design interviews, with real-world examples, comparison tables, tradeoffs, and easy memory rules.
How to Store Constantly Changing Location Data at Uber Scale
A story-driven system design guide to storing live location updates for millions of moving users per second, covering ingestion, geospatial indexing, hot data, cold history, queues, databases, and failure handling.
How to Stand Out in System Design Interviews as a Senior Engineer
A concise, story-driven guide for senior engineers preparing for system design interviews, focused on tradeoffs, failure modes, operational maturity, and business-aware architecture decisions.
Database Sharding System Design Interview: The Pizza Night Story Engineers Never Forget
A story-driven guide to database sharding for system design interviews, covering partition keys, scaling bottlenecks, tradeoffs, failures, and the mental model senior engineers use under pressure.