System Design
Requirements & Estimation
6 practice questions. Free questions open a full answer guide; the rest unlock with Pro.
- Before you design anything, how do you run the capacity estimation for a new system — say a link-shortener doing a few hundred million reads a day — and how do those numbers actually change your design?
- When I hand you an open-ended prompt like 'design a ride-hailing app,' how do you pin down the requirements before you start drawing boxes?Go Pro
- An interviewer hands you a deliberately vague prompt — 'design Twitter' — with no numbers and no constraints. How do you turn that into a set of requirements you can actually design against?Go Pro
- Design a URL shortener (like bit.ly). Walk me through your approach from requirements to a production-ready system.Go Pro
- We're sizing a new image-hosting service that will serve a social feed. Walk me through how you'd estimate the storage, QPS, and bandwidth we need.Go Pro
- Before you design anything, how do you do a back-of-the-envelope capacity estimate? Walk me through sizing a system that ingests user-uploaded photos for 50 million daily active users.Go Pro
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