System Design Interview - an Insider's Guide

What Hacker News says

1. MulticompJul 2026
   Gene Kim wrote the DevOps Handbook and I think was at least involved in the related DORA and Phoenix Project and Unicorn Project office narrative books. Between those and the Google SRE book, I feel very well placed to have continuing value in the SDLC pipeline for wrangling the oncoming armies of Jr Developers-as-AI-agents-and-sometimes-humans into alignment. I also recommend System Design Interview 1 and 2 books by Xu for logical system design refurbishment, Designing Data Intensive Applications for most company programs, and Hexagonal Architecture Explained by Cockburn for finally getting something as small as a class or module to something as large as an entire Information System to have clear modular boundaries, without needing to do fuzzy pattern matching around half-remembered SOLID principles and GoF design patterns or trying to blindly apply 12 factor app design principles.

   Quality used to take a back seat because there was so much legwork to do. AI has reduced the cost to be excellent, so let's be as excellent as our environments let us.

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2. cosmicradianceOct 2024
   System Design Interview I and II - Alex Xu. Take one of the topics and do it practically.
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3. bwh2Dec 2023
   I highly recommend the book System Design Interview by Alex Xu.
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4. jamestimminsJul 2023
   Haven't read the newsletter, but really enjoy the System Design Interview book by Alex, who writes ByteByteGo.
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5. kulikalovJun 2023
   System Design Interview Volume 2 contains a great overview of all kinds of architectures if you are into this kind of things. From there just pick the techs that you don't know and learn. This book is like a table of contents of other techs
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6. shahsyedMar 2023
   I've only read up to Part Two so far but find the guide is extremely helpful and resonates with other resources (i.e Grokking the System Design Interview) and with my own experiences for what I believe is the very broken interview process that we face today.

   Highly recommend. Interviewing.io is one of the best resources for those doing prep today and the team behind it is awesome.

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