Design a URL shortener — thinking out loud in English
Pergunta
Scenario: a system design round in English. Prompt: "Design a URL shortener." Narrate your reasoning in English, the way you would to the interviewer.
Resposta esperada
Open by asking clarifying questions in English ("Before I design anything — what read/write ratio should I assume? Do we need custom aliases? Analytics?"). Then state assumptions out loud, sketch the core flow (hash or counter → base62 → store mapping → redirect on read), and call out the main trade-offs verbally: collision handling, cache for hot links, DB choice for a read-heavy key-value workload. Useful spoken connectors: "Let's start with the requirements", "The main bottleneck here is reads, so...", "One option is X; the downside is Y", "I'll come back to that". The grade is on structured narration in English, not on a perfect diagram.
Por que perguntam isso
System design em inglês penaliza quem fica em silêncio pensando. Treine as frases-ponte ("let me think about that for a second", "the trade-off here is") até saírem sem esforço — elas compram tempo sem parecer travado.