Scope puzzle
Clarify before drawing
Design a URL shortener for public links, private team links, and click analytics.
Puzzle target
Choose the first moves that prevent overbuilding while preserving the product behavior.
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Complete each design choice to unlock the review. The feedback above will point out what your current tradeoff misses.
Flash cards
Review the key moves
What is the main idea behind System Design: Requirements and Scope?
Lesson checks
Practice each idea before moving on
Short Mimo-style checks built from this lesson's code, terms, and sequence.
Which statement best captures the main point of this lesson?
Put the learning moves in the order that makes the concept easiest to apply.
System design is a sequence of explicit tradeoffs. Start small: clarify the goal, estimate load, pick the simplest architecture, then name what breaks first.
| Design surface | What you decide |
|---|---|
| Requirements | Functional behavior, constraints, and non-goals |
| Scale | Reads, writes, storage, bandwidth, and latency target |
| Architecture | Clients, load balancer, services, cache, database, queue, and workers |
| Reliability | Failure mode, fallback, retry, and metric |
| Goal | Turn an open-ended prompt into users, actions, constraints, and non-goals. |
Practice Task
- Name functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and the first clarifying question before drawing components.
- Use the design puzzle below to choose components and tradeoffs.
- Explain the bottleneck before adding more infrastructure.