Originally published at malaymehta.com
The Interview Trap
If you look at most system design tutorials, you get an extreme use case. Design Twitter. Design YouTube. Scale it to a billion users. Draw boxes on a whiteboard for 45 minutes.
Do you think your app will be used by a billion users on day one? The answer is almost always no. But the tutorials don't teach you what to do when you have 500 users, unclear requirements, a team of four, and a quarter to ship something that works.
Real system design is nothing like a whiteboard interview. You don't get clean requirements, you don't design from scratch, and nobody asks you to handle a billion requests per second on day one.
