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L5 Prep

Week 05 — System design intensive I

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Goal: shift the center of gravity. Design becomes the main event.

  • 5 full design problems, 45 min each, spoken, timed. Pick from: URL shortener, rate limiter, web crawler, search typeahead/autocomplete, distributed cache.
  • After each: write a self-critique — what did you miss? Did you scope before designing? Did you estimate? Did you name a failure mode?
  • Read 2 Google papers and take notes: MapReduce and Bigtable. Being able to reference real systems by name is a differentiator.
  • Coding maintenance: 8 problems, mixed, timed — do not let coding decay.
  • Behavioral: 4 more stories (target: 10). Start rehearsing them at 2 minutes each.

Exit criteria: you can run the first 10 minutes of a design (scope → requirements → estimation → API) without hesitating.