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System Design Interviews, Day by Day — Day 1: The Framework
System design interviews have a way of feeling bigger than they are. The scope is wide open, the problem is deliberately vague, and if you haven’t interviewed in a while, that blank whiteboard can be intimidating. I’ve watched strong engineers — people who’ve shipped systems serving real traffic — freeze in the first five minutes simply because they didn’t have a plan for how to attack the problem. That’s what this series is about. I’m going to build the prep up day by day, each post leaning on the one before it, until you’ve got a complete, repeatable approach rather than a pile of disconnected tips. I’ve written about how to think about these interviews before — see my piece on non-functional requirements as the real framework and system design framework— but this series goes deeper and more hands-on. Today is the scaffolding. No deep dive into databases or caching yet — that’s what the rest of the series is for. Day 1 is about…
3 min readJun 28, 2026
