System design in two weeks
A day by day plan for an interview that is close: the round itself, the building blocks, and ten questions practised out loud against the clock.
How do I prepare for a system design interview in two weeks?
Two weeks is enough to learn the shape of the round and about ten design questions well. It is not enough to learn all of system design, so this plan picks the chapters that the most questions lean on and skips the rest.
Plan on about two hours a day: one or two chapters, then one design question run out loud with a 45 minute timer and scored with the rubric in the first chapter. Each block ends with that question. The last two days are only practice.
- Stage 01Days 1 and 2: the round and the numbers
How the 45 minutes run, how you are scored, and the arithmetic every design starts with.
5 of 5 writtenCheckpointDesign a URL shortener - Stage 02Days 3 and 4: where the data lives
Choosing a store, copying it, and splitting it.
6 of 6 writtenCheckpointDesign a unique ID generator - Stage 03Days 5 and 6: speed and async
Caches, queues, and what happens when a message arrives twice.
6 of 6 writtenCheckpointDesign a rate limiter - Stage 04Days 7 and 8: the classic questionsCheckpointDesign a web crawler
Read two, then run the third yourself before reading it.
4 of 4 written - Stage 05Days 9 and 10: location, files and mediaCheckpointDesign a file sync service
Questions where geography or bandwidth is the hard part.
4 of 4 written - Stage 06Days 11 and 12: senior and staff
Finding the constraint, pricing each decision, and defending it under pushback.
4 of 4 writtenCheckpointDesign IRCTC tatkal booking - Stage 07Days 13 and 14: only practiceCheckpointRerun your lowest scoring question
No new chapters. Rerun your two lowest scoring questions out loud, timed, ideally with someone who interrupts, and score both runs again.
2 of 2 written