Design a Photo Album App
Company: Robinhood
Role: Frontend Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a web-based photo album application.
The product has three main screens:
1. **Album list page**: shows a list of albums. Each album displays a cover photo and album name.
2. **Album detail page**: shows photos inside a selected album. Users can add photos and rename the album.
3. **Photo info page**: shows details for a selected photo.
Functional requirements:
- Users can view all albums.
- Users can open an album and view its photos.
- Users can rename an album.
- Users can upload photos to an album.
- Changes should sync across devices in near real time.
- The system should support sorting photos or albums by city.
- The system should support descending sort order.
Discuss:
- Client and server architecture.
- API design.
- State management and data normalization.
- Real-time cross-device synchronization.
- Photo upload flow.
- Trade-offs between different approaches.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in frontend system design, covering client-server architecture, API design, state management and data normalization, real-time cross-device synchronization, file upload flows, and trade-off analysis.