Interview Prep.

Notes I'm building while preparing for staff engineering interviews. Markdown was getting in the way — these are the richer versions, with diagrams, animated SVGs, and interview-ready phrasing baked in.

System Design

Concepts

Sharding

Why shard, when not to, how to pick a shard key, and what the choice costs you forever. Five real systems compared side-by-side; the Slicer compute-vs-data distinction; ID generation; capacity planning math.

Problems

Coming soon — URL shortener, distributed cache, real-time chat, more.

DSA

Coming soon.

Personal interview-prep notes by Alok Tripathy. Built with care. Updated continuously.