System Design

Wes and Kevin•systemdesign.buzzsprout.com

Software Engineers Wes Moncrief and Kevin Li discuss aspects of the system design interview, as well as related topics in designing large and interesting software architectures. If you're new here, I'd suggest starting with the episode "Facebook Timeline Interview". I'll also note that our first few episodes had lower quality audio than our subsequent episodes.We'd love to hear any listener feedback - email us at thesystemdesignpodcast@gmail.com

Last refreshed: April 28th, 2026 at 7:45 AM ⓘ

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Episodes

Dropbox Interview

Kevin asks Wes to design Dropbox, with an emphasis on designing the data model and storage techniques to scale out. Helpful links: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/design-dropbox-a-system-design-interview-question/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE4gwstWhmc https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebSockets_API https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/object-storage

Feb 28, 2021•33 min

Distributed Caches

As Kevin prepares to start a new job at Instacart, he explains some ideas around how a company like Instacart could employ caching to improve the scalability of their services. Show notes: https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/all-things-caching-use-cases-benefits-strategies-choosing-a-caching-technology-exploring-fa6c1f2e93aa https://ieftimov.com/post/when-why-least-frequently-used-cache-implementation-golang/ https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer#cache https://memcached.org/ http...

Feb 14, 2021•26 min

Message Queues

Wes and Kevin talk about message queues, the problems they solve, and how they work. https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer http://highscalability.com/all-time-favorites/ https://netflixtechblog.com/ https://www.rabbitmq.com/tutorials/tutorial-one-python.html P.S., Wes learned how to edit podcasts better thanks to this guide - https://podigy.co/podcast-editing-guide/ , hopefully this podcast has the best audio quality yet!...

Dec 06, 2020•31 min

SQL vs noSQL Databases

Breaking away from the interview format, Wes and Kevin deep dive into SQL vs noSQL databases. Show notes: ACID compliance - https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/acid-compliance-what-it-means-and-why-you-should-care CAP theorem https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/cap-theorem https://mwhittaker.github.io/blog/an_illustrated_proof_of_the_cap_theorem Cool article explaining the problem with saying you can have 2 out of 3 properties of CAP http://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-database...

Oct 17, 2020•30 min•Ep. 3

Facebook Timeline Interview

Wes asks Kevin to design the Facebook/Twitter Timeline with an emphasis on scaling to a large number of users. I'd encourage you to pause where relevant to try to think through these designs yourself - it really helps the content sink in. Helpful Links RabbitMQ quick start documentation - https://www.rabbitmq.com/getstarted.html Apache Kafka introductinon - https://kafka.apache.org/intro

Sep 16, 2020•34 min•Ep. 2

Google Docs Interview

In our first episode, Kevin gives Wes a mock interview on how to design google docs. Helpful links The git storage technique we referenced is described in detail here - https://hypirion.com/musings/understanding-persistent-vector-pt-1 (Note that this is not git, but the same technique applies) Website with algorithm for merge conflict resolution - https://operational-transformation.github.io/

Sep 15, 2020•44 min•Ep. 1

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