Hello Devs, for months, I felt confident about system design interviews.
I'd watched endless YouTube videos. I'd studied architecture diagrams. I could explain how Netflix builds recommendation systems. I understood Kafka, Redis, load balancers, and microservices. I'd memorized the designs of Twitter, Uber, YouTube, and TinyURL.
Then I sat down for my first real system design interview and froze.
The interviewer asked: "How would you design a notification system?"
I had memorized notification systems. I knew about push notifications, email queues, delivery workers, and retry logic. I could recite architectural patterns.
