1 / 5
An interviewer asks you to design a URL shortener. What is a good opening sentence?
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Good system design interviews begin with requirement clarification — scale, access patterns, and constraints before jumping to implementation.
2 / 5
You are explaining a caching layer in your design. Which sentence is most technically precise?
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Precise system design language names the technology, its position in the architecture, and the problem it solves.
3 / 5
How would you describe a trade-off between consistency and availability in your design?
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The CAP theorem trade-off must be articulated explicitly: what is sacrificed and what is gained for the specific use case.
4 / 5
You need to explain database sharding in your design. Which sentence is best?
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Sharding explanations should specify the sharding key, the partitioning strategy, and the scaling problem being solved.
5 / 5
The interviewer asks: How would you handle 10x the current load? What is the best response?
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Scaling responses should address each bottleneck tier: application, database, and caching — with specific patterns for each.