Posted on: 2024-11-11

I landed a new job in November 2023 and I had two weeks before starting. I had a lot of notes from my interviews and I wanted to reorganize them. I decided to write a system design book to collect everything in an easy way to consume the information for the next time I need to interview.

Drafting the Book

Drafting the book is the crux of the job. I had a large amount of node in my Microsoft OneNote as a starting point. Then, I added my personal experience and did additional research to any concept that was not clear to me. The drafting process is very iterative and leaded to common patterns and technologies that I wanted to include in the book. I created a section before covering examples of system design for that reason. During drafting, I was illustrating the book with diagrams and examples.

Illustrating the Book

The book has over 400 illustrations. I wanted to create something easy to read and illustration goes a long way to clarify potentially complex concepts. I used draw.io to create the diagrams and exported the images to include them in Microsoft Word.

Reviewing the Book

I was not reviewing chapter by chapter but instead wrote as much as I could. I ended up having over 1,000 page using a 9x6 inches format. I modified the book to be 7.5x9.25 inches to have a better reading experience. Amazon does not allows book above 827 pages. Also, I modified font size and spacing. The result was 817 pages! The review process took a while and I did it in many phases. I did it when I was about 50% completed and then around 80% and then 100%. I used many tools like Grammarly. In the past, I hired a proofreader but I had the experience that you cannot iterate much. Once they are done, any changes require a new proofreading. I decided to do it myself with the help of modern tools.

Table of Content, Figures, and Index

One of the last task was to create table of content, figure and index. I already used Microsoft Word capability of using header, sub-header and sub-sub-header to create the table of content. I also used the caption feature to create the list of figures. The index uses Microsoft Word Index feature and it quite manual where you need to search words you believe is important. The process tags the word and once you generate the index automatically adjust the page number. Using all these automations helped greatly since adding paragraphs or adjusting images shifts the page. With a click of a button, the table of content, figures, and index are updated.

Reviewing Again The Book

The review process is never-ending. I had to review the book again to ensure that the table of content, figures, and index were correct. I also reviewed the book to ensure that the content was still relevant. I had to review a lot during the time of publishing the book because some images were off, or the text was not at the right page, or a spacing was making the reading uneasy. The challenge is that a change at page 13 may impact all the following one. Fortunately, the book uses Microsoft Word break page and other mechanism that mitigate the propagation of minor changes. However, the last review took me about 8 weeks.

Publishing the Book

I used Amazon service to publish the book. The main reason was that I was writing in my free time. Using a publisher increase the pressure to deliver chapter every month. I wanted to have the freedom to write when I wanted. The process is quite easy. You need to create an account, upload the book, and then Amazon does the rest. The book is available in many countries and you can set the price in many currencies.

Publishing with Kindle

I also published the book with Kindle. The process is quite similar to the book. You need to upload the book and Amazon does the rest. I downloaded a tool to convert to Microsoft Word PDF to ePub and then Kindle. The tools allows to see the books in different devices, set the chapters and other information. It was a fine experience with some hiccups but since it is a task that you do once, it is not a big deal.

So How Long Does It Take?

The book as 817 pages, 402 images and 219,000 words. I worked about 3 hours every weekday and rarely the weekend. I had a handful of days that I worked 5 hours on it and also few weekeday I skipped. Overall, I would say that 3 hours per day 5 days a week is a good estimate. The book took me 11 months between starting the writing and publishing to Amazon and thus we can estimate that it took me about 750 hours, so a little less than one hour per page.

Conclusion

While the Internet has a fast amount of information about system design, if you are looking for curated content, you might want to check my book. It is available on Amazon. If you are still working in a large company, the book is eligible for a refund of part of your company learning budget. The book is marketed for full-stack distributed system design and is not interview-specific.