Step 3: Design deep dive
Play this lessonThis lesson comes with a chapter quiz.By now you and the interviewer have agreed on the goals, the feature scope and a high-level blueprint, and you know which areas to focus on. Next, prioritize the components to dig into.
- Every interview is different. Sometimes the interviewer wants high-level design skills; for senior roles it may be performance characteristics, bottlenecks and resource estimates.
- Typical deep dives: the hash function for a URL shortener (Chapter 8), latency and online/offline status for a chat system (Chapter 12).
- Manage your time. Don't go deep into details that don't prove your abilities. For example, don't spend ages on Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm in a news feed interview.
In the news feed example, the deep dive would cover feed publishing (fanout strategies) and news feed retrieval (caching layers). You'll build both in Chapter 11.
Key takeaways
- Prioritize the most important or interesting components.
- Time is limited; avoid irrelevant rabbit holes.