How to use the System design Interview Flashcards
- 1. Choose topicsPick one topic or all of them, a round size, and whether to skip cards you already know.
- 2. Flip and gradeRead the question, answer aloud, then reveal the answer and mark it known or still learning.
- 3. Review your resultsMissed cards come back later in the round. At the end see your score by topic and download the cards to revise.
What the deck covers
This deck covers the building blocks and trade-offs used in system design rounds, plus two example designs and an estimation card. The 22 cards are grouped into 10 topics: Basics, Theory, Components, Data, Messaging, APIs, Architecture, Example, Reliability, Estimation. Answers are short on purpose: one or two sentences you can say out loud, which you then back up with an example from your own projects.
A card from the deck
Q: Estimate storage for 10 million users posting 2 photos a day at 500 KB each.
A: 10M × 2 × 0.5 MB = 10 TB a day, about 3.65 PB a year before replication and thumbnails.
Estimation questions test method, not exact numbers. Say your assumptions aloud and round sensibly.
How to study with it
- Practise the approach card on a new system each week, timing yourself at 35 minutes.
- For each component card, name a real product that uses it.
- In the System design deck, cards you mark "still learning" come back three cards later in the same round, and the results screen lists them so you can download a revision sheet.
More questions from this deck
Other System design questions you'll meet include:
- Vertical vs horizontal scaling?
- Strong vs eventual consistency?
- Cache-aside vs write-through?
- What is database sharding?
- Why use a message queue?
Frequently asked questions
Is this for freshers?
Freshers get simpler design questions; the basics here help at every level.
Are diagrams included?
No. Draw your own; that's what the interview asks for.
Are the System design interview flashcards free?
Yes. You can flip through every card of the System design interview flashcards without signing up. When you open your results for the first time, we ask once for your name and WhatsApp number; after that the System design interview flashcards and every other Uncodemy tool open straight away.