Unfortunately, Non-abstract Large System Design (NALSD) is a lesser known concept to most of the engineering world. When I started preparing for the NALSD interview I found resources on pure NALSD to be rare. Therefore, I primarily used the traditional system design wisdom to prepare for this type of interview. I found tons of material on traditional system design and respective interview questions including recorded mock interview sessions. I used those resources to get a better understanding of how distributed systems are designed nowadays. Upon that I built an understanding for NALSD by attaching realistic numbers to the abstract designs I read about.

I found the troubleshooting interview preparation to be one of the more fuzzy ones. The first question I asked myself was: What is Troubleshooting anyway?

Cleverly combining talking to my recruiter with sophisticated Intawebz research I came up with the following definition:

Troubleshooting in the context of interviewing is the ability to approach problem solving in an educated, logical, and structured way. It requires communicating by sharing thoughts and ideas with the interviewer while working through a (potentially networked) distributed system scenario.

At first I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of topics and learning opportunities. From free videos on YouTube with varying quality to paid courses offering a thoughtful curriculum. Out of the many structured and well-designed learning paths towards coding interviews I had to choose one or two. The secret was to follow one or maybe two of them and not waste time jumping back and forth between tens of different curricula. Sometimes it is better to trust that the author put some serious thought into compiling a suitable learning path.

According to staff.com Google receives 2 million applications per year. An average year has about 260 working days. That leaves us with over 7500 applications per day. Getting and maintaining recruiter attention is crucial to make it through to the next stage.

Overwhelmed with the sheer amount of books, articles, and papers to read, a myriad of talks and videos to watch, and an ever-increasing number of things to learn I almost gave up. I was frustrated by the chaos that I have created out of open tabs, bookmarks, handwritten notes, and stacks of books on my desk. Instead of motivating and inspiring me the massive amount of available data had a chilling effect on me. It was time for reflection!