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Senior Engineering Interview Handbook / Reading section

Part 08 - Computer Systems Foundations

Refresh the systems primitives that support senior design and production conversations.

190entries 176chapters 1sections

This part gives the background needed for credible design trade-offs: networking, storage, concurrency, consistency, queues, caches, databases, distributed systems, operating systems, and runtime behavior.

By the end of this part, you should be able to explain the primitives behind your design choices without turning the interview into a textbook recitation.

  1. 62 Processes, Threads, and Memory A practical runtime model for diagnosing isolation, resident memory, allocation, garbage collection, leaks, context switching, locality, and resource limits. Read
  2. 63 Concurrency and Synchronization A practical model for reasoning about races, locks, semaphores, atomics, visibility, deadlocks, starvation, thread pools, event loops, async execution, and … Read
  3. 64 Networking and the Web A request-path approach to DNS, TCP, UDP, TLS, HTTP/1.1 through HTTP/3, proxies, load balancers, connection pools, deadlines, retries, idempotency, caching, … Read
  4. 65 Databases and Storage Engines A request-path chapter on database and storage-engine judgment: data models, composite indexes, B-trees, LSM trees, write-ahead logs, query plans, … Read
  5. 66 Transactions and Isolation A mechanism-first chapter on transactions and isolation: ACID, concurrency anomalies, locks, MVCC, optimistic control, idempotency, distributed transactions, … Read
  6. 67 Caching and Content Delivery A mechanism-first guide to cache-aside, write-through, TTLs, invalidation, stampedes, hot keys, browser caches, CDNs, edge computation, and consistency … Read
  7. 68 Queues, Logs, and Stream Processing A mechanism-first guide to queues, logs, delivery semantics, ordering, partitioning, offsets, consumer groups, backpressure, replay, deduplication, dead-letter … Read
  8. 69 Distributed Systems Fundamentals A mechanism-first guide to partial failure, time, ordering, replication, quorums, partitions, CAP, leader election, consensus, coordination, and repair. Read
  9. 70 Search and Retrieval Systems A query-trace guide to inverted indexes, field analysis, ranking, autocomplete, distributed search, freshness, permissions, and hybrid vector retrieval. Read
  10. 71 Security and Privacy A boundary-first guide to threat modeling, authentication, authorization, input safety, SSRF, deserialization, secrets, encryption, least privilege, dependency … Read
  11. 72 Cloud, Containers, and Runtime Platforms A workload-first guide to virtual machines, containers, orchestration, managed platforms, serverless execution, service discovery, health, autoscaling, … Read
  12. 73 Observability, Performance, and Cost A sustained investigation of observability, latency distributions, throughput, saturation, load testing, capacity planning, performance diagnosis, and … Read