Design a simple greeting-card web app
Company: Atlassian
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a web application for creating and viewing text-only greeting cards with an emphasis on **shipping quickly (MVP)**.
### Core user stories
- A user can **create** a new greeting card containing **text only**.
- A user can **view a list of greeting cards they created**.
- A user can **view a specific card they created**.
### Constraints / non-goals
- No images, templates, payments, or social features required.
- Focus on an MVP architecture that can be launched fast, but explain how it can scale if traffic grows.
### What to cover
- High-level architecture (frontend, backend, database)
- Data model
- API design
- Authentication/authorization approach (minimal but sufficient to support “my cards”)
- Basic operational concerns (deployment, monitoring, security)
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a minimal web application architecture for an MVP greeting-card service, covering frontend/backend/database trade-offs, data modeling, API design, authentication/authorization, and basic operational concerns.