System design interview question
"Design Pastebin. Users paste text, get a URL, and share it. Pastes can be public or unlisted, can expire, and some are very large. 10 million pastes a day, 100 million views."
A warm-up question closely related to the URL shortener, with one meaningful difference: you are storing arbitrary user content of highly variable size, which makes storage strategy, expiry, and abuse handling more interesting. The good signal is whether the candidate notices the text/metadata split and treats abuse as a first-class concern.
On Practick another engineer interviews you live for 60 minutes on a question from this bank. They have the full interviewer guide beside the call: the answers to your clarifying questions, the numbers to hand out, a ladder of follow-ups and a scoring rubric. You get the model solution once the session settles. It is free: interview someone for an hour and you have earned your own.
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