YOUR BRIEF
What to work through
Work through google Docs as a spoken system design interview. Start by clarifying the scope, sketch a working design and explain the trade-offs behind your choices.
- Create a document
- Several users edit the same document at once
- Everyone sees the others’ changes in real time
- See other users’ cursors and who is present
- View the document’s history
BEFORE YOU START
Constraints to discuss
- Scale to millions of open WebSocket connections
- Every copy of a document converges to the same text
- Edits show up for others with low latency
- Tolerate short offline periods without losing edits
Need a starting point?
Watch for these common gaps as you prepare:
- Sending the whole document on every keystroke
- Last write wins on the whole document
- Storing cursor positions in the database
- No answer for which server owns a document
- Operations with no base version, so the server cannot transform them
Why this question is in the collection
These sources connect the problem to company interview reports or preparation guides. They do not guarantee what a company will ask you.