Approach to prepare for system design interviews

Over time, I’ve compiled a giant list of resources for learning the theory behind distributed systems. It has so much content that it’s intimidating and has its fair share of heavy research papers.

I just realized that it’d be foolhardy to try to consume all that content. My goal is to be well-prepared for system design interviews and passively consuming and trying to memorize the stuff in these resources won’t help with that. So, I am going to keep them aside and focus on more important things. Those are:

• DDIA book is a must - I need to memorize all of it by heart.
• Implement a few algorithms and technologies.
• I have a list of concepts that I’d like to understand: find resources on-demand to grok them.
• Practice some real world SDI questions.