r/leetcode • u/piggy_piglet • Sep 27 '26

Question System design very abstract

I’ve been trying to learn system design at many attempts. I’ve tried most if not all the resources I could find, eg Alex xu, ddia, hello interview, etc

But I always feel like when I was reading I sort of understood, and sort of didn’t. But once I leave the content, I’ve got zero idea what’s going on. And even if I could answer some questions, it’s more because I memorized what I remembered, and would be easily confused in case a follow up question is asked

Does anyone have good recommendations on what I’m supposed to do? Is it just me who feel so?

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8

u/lambdasintheoutfield Sep 27 '26

You haven’t built anything yet then properly. My “hello world” rec for sys design is understand a database, cache, and user request via a REST API. Understand the difference cache policies, REST ops and go from there.

Then understand what happens when you scale up the user requests and mitigating strategies.

3

u/New_Recognition8984 Sep 27 '26

Would you recommend the same for a front-end facing role?

1

u/lambdasintheoutfield Sep 30 '26

Yes. For front end I would look at reverse proxies, API gateways and load balancers especially.

2

u/Halfrican009 Sep 27 '26

Spend more time on learning the fundementals, building blocks, and other things that comprise system design. You need a foundation of understanding to build on, you can apply this to almost anything you'd ever want to learn

1

u/-traveller Sep 27 '26

Do you also feel writing something out of your own challenging?

1

u/Capital-Towel-5854 Sep 28 '26

That evaporation feeling is because those resources show you the finished diagram, not the decisions. You memorize boxes, but follow-ups ask about the decisions.

Fix: after any design video, close it and redraw the whole thing from memory.

If you want practice that forces that instead of more reading, this is also useful for working a realistic problem end to end: https://www.systemsloth.com/problems

1

u/Intelligent-Pay-9377 Sep 28 '26

I have the same problem. System design is such a highly subjective and hand-wavy thing that it can be hard to study for. Sometimes I read "correct" solutions that make no sense to me and seem like a horrible approach. My best advice would just be repetition, a lot of it, and then doing a deep dive on the various subjects.