The Reddit thread that had once mocked him now had a pinned comment from a senior architect at Netflix:

Instead of dryly explaining concepts like sharding or load balancing in isolation, Xu teaches them through highly relevant tech company clones. You learn how to scale by looking at specific architectures:

Distributed locking, geo-replication, big data architectures Key-value stores, URL shorteners, Web crawlers

: Recommended for deep-dives into the fundamental building blocks of systems. System Design Primer (GitHub)

Use a tool to draw the architectures described in the book.

The mock interview happened on Tuesday. Alex sat across from a senior engineer, let's call him Marcus.