LUC #08: Demystifying System Design — An Easy-to-Follow Guide
Discover how to navigate system design and its varying stages
Level Up Coding
June 27, 2023
Welcome back to another edition of LevelUpCoding’s newsletter.
In today’s issue:
The components of system design
Debugging workflow (recap)
SQL execution order (recap)
Python list methods (recap)
Read time: 4 minutes
The Components of System Design
As the saying goes, if you fail to plan you plan to fail.
System design provides the blueprint for building an application. Without it, applications often become a big costly mess.
The goal of system design is to create a dependable, efficient, secure, and user-friendly system that satisfies the requirements of the business and its users.
The process involves various steps which are noted below in the general sequence they occur:
1. Requirements analysis
The process begins by defining system requirements. This involves understanding the goals, tasks, and constraints of the system.
This phase is especially critical as it lays the foundation for the other stages.
2. High-Level Design
The architectural overview of the system is created in this phase. It describes the major components of the system and how they interact with each other.
3. Detailed Design
After we have a general idea of how the entire system works, we can design the detailed specifications of each component.
4. Interface Design
Next up is interface design which involves planning the user interfaces and the application programming interfaces.
5. Database Design
This part of the process involves designing tables and relationships, as well as defining how data is going to be stored, accessed, and manipulated.
6. Security Design
In this step, we look at one very important element — security.
This is where we define how the system will protect data, ensure privacy, and handle potential threats.
7. Performance Design
The main focus of this section is on the performance criteria listed in the initial requirements analysis. The outcome is a design that meets those requirements.
8. Error Handling and Logging
Here, the emphasis is on analyzing potential areas of failure and determining how the system will respond.
9. Testability
This step involves identifying which components will be tested, how the tests will be carried out, and how the findings will be communicated and used.
———
System design is an iterative process, involving going back and forth between the steps outlined above to refine the solution.
Application development is made easier with a well-defined design, which provides a blueprint for building secure and performant systems.
Debugging Workflow
There is a process to debugging effectively, and it often involves the following steps:
Identify the issue
Isolate the source of the problem
Analyze the issue and gather information
Formulate a hypothesis and test it
Implement the solution and test it
Document the problem and solution, share it with your team
SQL execution order
The secret behind optimizing SQL queries is to understand their execution order.
There are eight steps in the execution of a SQL query.
To maximize efficiency, focus on optimizing the steps earlier in the query.
Maximize the WHERE clause.
Python list methods
append() — Adds an element to the end of the list.
extend() — Adds the elements of a list to the end of another list.
insert() — Adds an element at a specific index.
remove() — Removes the first occurrence of an element.
pop() — Removes and returns the element at a given index.
count() — Returns the number of times a value appears in a list.
sort() — Sorts the list in ascending order.
reverse() — Reverses the order of elements in the list.
That wraps up this week’s issue of LevelUpCoding’s newsletter!
Join us again next week where we’ll explore essential computer network protocols, Python’s built-in data structures, and the Pub/Sub model.