How do you practice system design when you've never built anything at scale?
I've got a system design round coming up and I'm honestly stuck on how to prep. Every guide assumes you've already worked on something with real traffic, but my day job is a small internal tool with maybe 50 users. I can memorize "add a cache, add a queue, shard the DB" but I have zero intuition for when any of that actually matters.
For those who got good at these rounds without big-scale experience: did reading design write-ups actually help, or did it just make you better at parroting? What closed the gap for you?
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AnonymousAnon Reading write-ups helped me, but only once I sketched my own version first and then compared. If you just read them you absorb the conclusions without the reasoning. And nobody expects a junior to have run something at scale, they want to see you reason about tradeoffs out loud.
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AnonymousAnon The thing that clicked for me was to stop treating it like trivia. Pick one system you use every day and try to break it in your head: what happens at 10x traffic, where does it fall over first. You build intuition for when by imagining the failure, not by memorizing the fix.