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Ask HN: How to study for system design that doesn't include front end/back end?

38 points 3a2d29 | 1 comments | 13 Mar 25 23:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.227s | source

I got a system design interview where I was asked to build a pricer for a financial product, then expand it to multiple pricers that might share inputs.

This was not the typical system design interview where you have to deal with APIs / load balancers / latency / etc

I have studied that a lot, but what about these type of general interviews?

1. t-writescode ◴[13 Mar 25 23:54 UTC] No.43358407[source]▶
APIs are just building blocks and blobs of single-ish responsibility. It's good to ask lots of different questions to understand the actual question being asked, what the desired capabilities of the thing being asked are, etc.

From there, you should be able to start laying out the different components and how they interact.

Edit: here's some areas of consideration when designing a system:

  * what does this thing do?
  * what are the expected inputs and outputs of the whole system?
  * what operations are we wanting to be able to perform against it?
  * how frequently will each of these operations be done?
  * how quickly do we want a response from this whole system?
  * what different sorts of integrations do we expect for this system? Any?
  * how often do we expect the system to change?
  * where do we expect to expand the system the most in the future? What will that look like?
I'm sure others will have many, many more things to add