Notes on design patterns, system design, microservices architecture, and interview preparation.
- 01/15
Design Patterns: Catalog
The three catalogs of design patterns — Creational, Structural, and Behavioral — and what each is for.
- 02/15
Interview Prep: DSA Questions
A run-through of common data structures and algorithms interview questions, from arrays and linked lists to Big-O of common operations.
- 03/15
Microservices: Overview
What makes a microservice architecture — independent databases, loose coupling, sync/async communication — and the key components (API gateway, service registry, config server).
- 04/15
System Design: Problem-Solving Steps
An 8-step framework for approaching system design interview problems, worked through a Twitter-like service example.
- 05/15
Design Patterns: Observer Pattern
Decoupling a payment manager from its listeners (notification, logging) by evolving from direct coupling into the Observer pattern.
- 06/15
Interview Prep: Spring Framework Basics
What Spring is, Inversion of Control, dependency injection, POJOs vs Java Beans, and the IoC container.
- 07/15
Microservices: Design Patterns
Nine design patterns for microservices — Service Discovery, Edge Server, Reactive Microservices, Central Configuration, Centralized Logging, Distributed Tracing, Circuit Breaker, Control Loop, and Centralized Monitoring — each as problem/solution/requirements.
- 08/15
System Design: HTTP & Networking
HTTP vs HTTPS, the five-layer TCP model, and what actually happens when you type a URL into your browser.
- 09/15
Design Patterns: Factory Method
Implementing the Factory Method pattern with a logistics/transport example, and why it makes adding new transport types easy.
- 10/15
Interview Prep: Java Core Concepts
Method overloading vs overriding, heap vs stack, shallow vs deep copy, garbage collection, equals/hashCode, collections hierarchy, and more Java fundamentals Q&A.
- 11/15
Microservices: Monitoring & Software Enablers
The five principles of microservices monitoring, common monitoring tools, service virtualization, and the Spring Cloud components that enable microservices.
- 12/15
Interview Prep: Database Design
DBMS types, ACID properties, SQL vs NoSQL, normalization/denormalization, the N+1 query problem, and index types.
- 13/15
Interview Prep: Java Backend Guide
A structured Q&A tour of Java backend fundamentals — core language skills, database management, APIs and web services, cloud computing, and DevOps practices.
- 14/15
Interview Prep: API Design
What an API is, REST principles, SOAP vs REST, endpoint design, versioning, idempotence, rate limiting, OAuth, pagination, and documentation — with code examples.
- 15/15
Interview Prep: Practice Question Bank
A consolidated, deduplicated bank of unanswered practice questions spanning core Java, collections, concurrency, Spring, microservices, Hibernate/JPA, DevOps, design patterns, and coding exercises.