@hackproduct9: One of the biggest mistakes in system design interviews is thinking there’s a single best database. There isn’t. Great engineers don’t start with PostgreSQL, Redis, Cassandra, or S3. They start with questions: • What kind of data am I storing? • How will it be accessed? • What’s the read/write pattern? • What’s the failure mode? • What are the latency requirements? That’s exactly how companies like Instagram think. Different data. Different access patterns. Different storage choices. Once you build this mental model, system design interviews become a lot less about memorization and a lot more about reasoning. Save this cheat sheet—you’ll use it in far more interviews than you think. Follow @hackproduct for more interview-ready mental models. #SystemDesign #AIEngineer #SoftwareEngineer #DataEngineering #DatabaseDesign