System design interview question
"Design an airport baggage handling system: bags are checked in, routed through conveyors and sorters to the right aircraft, transferred between connecting flights, and reunited with passengers. A major hub handles a hundred thousand bags a day. Physical machinery fails, flights change gates, and a bag that misses its flight costs money and goodwill."
software controlling physical processes that cannot be retried. Unlike any web system, the work item is a physical object moving on a conveyor: you cannot roll it back, you cannot re-run it, and the deadline is an aircraft that departs whether or not the bag arrived. The discriminating insight is designing for physical irreversibility and real-time deadlines.
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