My personal experience has taught me a lesson: In the SDE interview in North America, having a distributed system project on your resume is really a plus. However, the market is really flooded with many toy projects that come with distributed systems. When looking for projects, you must learn to distinguish them!
Here I'd like to tell you all about a TCS project that I worked on before. The architecture design of this project was achieved by demonstrating the understanding of microservices, when they are needed, the design of common components, and Fault Tolerance. This project combines Kafka with the Schema Registry and Avro message format. The system uses MongoDB to record error records and is capable of tracking any received error messages and notifying relevant personnel.
So, how can you demonstrate on your resume through projects that you have applied and mastered distributed systems proficiently?
First, clarify the project goals and summarize the project background and core objectives in one or two sentences. For example: "Combining the real Product Requirements Document (PRD), a stock trading system integrating tracking, recording and managing various messages during the stock trading process was designed and implemented."
Second, highlight the cutting-edge technology stack. For instance, you could say: "In this project, you use Redis to implement distributed caching and build a message queue based on Kafka." "
Thirdly, learn to quantify achievements and demonstrate what you have achieved and what results you have obtained in this project. For example: "The throughput of the project system has been increased by 4%, and the average response time has been reduced from 200ms to 50ms."
Fourth, describe the challenges to be addressed, with a focus on the difficulties encountered in the project and the solutions. For example: "The problem of data consistency in a distributed environment has been solved. The Raft algorithm is adopted to implement the master-slave synchronization mechanism, which improves the reliability of the system."
Finally, learn to try to guide the interviewer to pay attention to the part of your project that uses distributed systems during the interview, and talk to the interviewer about some details of the distributed systems in the project, demonstrating your engineering thinking ability to solve problems.
In the SDE interview in North America, having a distributed system project on the resume is undoubtedly a highlight. It not only showcases your technical capabilities, but also becomes one of the significant advantages for you to get an interview and successfully land a job by clearly describing the project goals, technical implementation, and achievements, as well as effectively presenting your design ideas in the interview.
Release time:2025-04-23
