Design a Twitter-like timeline service
Company: Nooks
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a simplified Twitter-like system.
The system should support:
- User accounts and profiles
- Follow and unfollow
- Creating short text posts
- Viewing a user's own profile timeline
- Viewing a home timeline containing posts from followed accounts
- Optional discussion of likes, reposts, and notifications
Discuss:
- Functional and non-functional requirements
- APIs
- Data model and storage choices
- Feed generation strategy: fan-out on write, fan-out on read, or a hybrid
- Caching
- Handling celebrity accounts and hot keys
- Reliability, consistency, and scaling to millions of users
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable social feed systems, testing competencies in distributed systems, data modeling, API design, caching, consistency models, and infrastructure strategies for handling high-throughput features like follows and timelines, with the category being System Design.