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Know the concepts
but freeze in the interview?

Learn from short, focused guides you'll actually finish. Then practice explaining your design out loud to an AI interviewer that asks real follow-up questions.

Free interviews. No daily limit.

Sample interview

Sample URL Shortener interview. Design a URL shortener. What should it support, and at what scale? Speak or type an answer, then discuss a follow-up: What happens when one short link gets 100× the traffic?

Try it yourself

You read the guide. It made sense.
Then someone asks you to explain it out loud, and your mind goes blank.

  • You know the parts, not the order.Interviews need a structure to follow, not just facts.
  • Trade-offs are hard to say out loud.Understanding them silently is easier than explaining them under pressure.
  • Follow-ups break your flow.The first answer is rehearsed. The second question isn't.

Reading builds recognition. Interviews test recall. That's why practice has to include speaking.

Learn it. Say it. Keep it.

01 · Learn

Read it the way an engineer would explain it.

First principles, worked examples and the reasoning behind each decision, without the padding.

Core Concepts

Caching

A product-details endpoint reads the same popular records thousands of times. Each request loads product metadata, current price, inventory, and image references from the database. The database is healthy, but repeated work pushes its latency upward, and the endpoint slows down with it.

Read the caching guide
02 · Practice

Explain your design out loud.

Speak or type your answer. The interviewer asks follow-ups, like a real one would.

Sample question

Design a URL shortener. What should it support, and at what scale?

Try an AI interview
03 · Revise

Come back before it fades.

Short recall prompts bring back the key ideas, so they're there when you need them.

Recall, then reveal
CORE CONCEPTSQuestion
Cache invalidation

What does cache invalidation do, and how is it different from a TTL?

Try recalling it without looking.
Revisit a concept

See exactly where you got stuck.

After each interview you get a breakdown by stage, the moments that needed more depth, and the guides to read next.

Get your own report
Sample reportURL shortener
A moment to revisit

“You described the cache but didn't say how it stays fresh.”

Read: Cache invalidation

Guides you'll finish.
Practice that feels real.

Short enough to finish.

Each guide gets to the point: the idea, the trade-offs, a worked example. No filler.

AI where it helps.

It plays the interviewer, gives feedback on your answer, and quizzes you on recall.

Come back before it fades.

Short recall prompts bring back the key ideas, so they're there when you need them.

Built by Atharva Kulkarni, software engineer working on search infrastructure at Atlassian.

Meet Atharva on LinkedIn ↗

A few things you might be wondering.

Next time, don't freeze.