Fahim ul Haq – Medium

Fahim ul Haq

11.5K followers

Fahim ul Haq

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2d ago

Why weak trade-offs undermine strong interview answers

Every candidate I interview can name a cache. Far fewer can explain how that cache fails under this workload.

Why weak trade-offs undermine strong interview answers

Fahim ul Haq

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Jun 10

Managing data consistency is the hardest interview tradeoff

In nearly every System Design interview I conduct, the same mistake shows up early. The candidate says “strong consistency” or “eventual…

Managing data consistency is the hardest interview tradeoff

Fahim ul Haq

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Jun 9

Why interview frameworks matter when pressure kicks in

Over the past several years, I’ve conducted System Design interviews for backend and infrastructure roles, and I keep seeing the same…

Why interview frameworks matter when pressure kicks in

Fahim ul Haq

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Jun 8

The Amazon OA cheat sheet: Every pattern I’ve seen in 2026

If you have been preparing for the Amazon online assessment by memorizing LeetCode templates, there is a good chance you are optimizing for…

The Amazon OA cheat sheet: Every pattern I’ve seen in 2026

Fahim ul Haq

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Jun 2

Evaluating database tradeoffs under interview pressure

Most candidates I interview name a database within the first two minutes of a System Design interview. Before they ask about read-to-write…

Evaluating database tradeoffs under interview pressure

Fahim ul Haq

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Jun 1

What building distributed systems taught me about hiring

A cache time to live (TTL) set to 60 seconds. A read replica running about 90 seconds behind. Both settings were reasonable in isolation…

What building distributed systems taught me about hiring

Fahim ul Haq

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May 25

Designing GenAI pipelines in 2026 that survive long-term scale

The fastest way to ship a generative AI feature is usually the fastest way to create rewrite debt. That often means calling a model…

Designing GenAI pipelines in 2026 that survive long-term scale

Fahim ul Haq

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May 18

The hidden signals in a great System Design interview answer in 2026

Most candidates I interview draw a clean architecture within the first five minutes. Load balancer, cache, database, queue. The diagram…

The hidden signals in a great System Design interview answer in 2026

Fahim ul Haq

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May 11

When scalable architecture hurts more than it helps

I recently reviewed an architecture designed for 50,000 requests per second. The product’s actual traffic was nowhere close. In practice…

When scalable architecture hurts more than it helps

Fahim ul Haq

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May 4

Most GenAI systems collapse under real traffic. Here’s why.

The most misleading moment in a generative AI (GenAI) project is when the prototype looks production-ready. I have seen this pattern…

Most GenAI systems collapse under real traffic. Here’s why.

Fahim ul Haq

Fahim ul Haq

11.5K followers

Co-founder at Educative.io. Creating hands-on courses for Software Engineers & Engineering Enablement solutions for dev teams. Previously: Facebook, Microsoft.

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