A popular question in first interviews like on Launch Day is "What happens when I type [website address] and click enter?" It's a good conversation that can take up a good duration of time and show your technical communication chops. It's also very good to know what the process is like to get something like wikipedia.com on our screens.
Describe dataflow in a Fullstack application
System Design questions tests the candidate ability to be able to create a system based on a user prompt. A user prompt is either a client telling you what they want or a team making an assumption of what a potential user might want in an idea. What makes this different from an OOP Design question is that this focuses less on the application components themselves and more of the flow of data and how we scale that data based on our understanding of the various trade offs as we modify our system.
Understand the flow of data and how to scale.
User prompt: I want to be able to book movie theater seats online.
OOP Design is a good exercise on how to split up our system into different components. It's like React Components before they were cool but instead of React Components, we separate our system into different objects/classes. The main difficulty with problems like these are that they are opened ended and force you to think abstractly and creatively. One of the other main goals of this exercise is to be able to draw out diagrams to help with communicating abstract ideas before they are implemented in code. These problems are language agnostic.
Write a function that takes in the heads of two Singly Linked Lists that are in sorted order, respectively. The function should merge the lists in place (i.e., it shouldn't create a brand new list) and return the head of the merged list; the merged list should be in sorted order.