I jumped straight into the UI layer because the prompt mentioned views explicitly, which I think was a mistake.
Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements, then design a data model that efficiently supports day, month, and year views with event creation and management. Focus on scalability, performance, and user experience, and discuss trade-offs in your design choices.
Pro tip: Emphasize how you would handle recurring events and time zones, as these are common pitfalls in calendar systems and demonstrate depth of thought. Also, consider offline support and sync conflicts, which are critical for a production-grade calendar app.
Ask questions to understand the scope: expected number of users, event types (recurring, all-day), sharing/collaboration features, and non-functional requirements like latency and availability.
Design a schema for events, calendars, and users. Consider how to store recurring events efficiently (e.g., using RRULE) and how to index for fast range queries across different views.
Define APIs for CRUD operations on events and for fetching events for a given time range. Discuss how to render day, month, and year views efficiently, possibly using pre-aggregation or caching.
Address how to scale the system for many users and events, including database sharding, caching strategies, and handling high read/write loads. Discuss trade-offs between consistency and availability.
Cover recurring events, time zones, reminders, sharing, and offline support. Discuss how to handle conflicts and sync across devices.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.
Start by clarifying requirements like consistency, latency, and conflict resolution, then propose a sync architecture with a central server and real-time push notifications. Discuss trade-offs between different sync strategies and how to handle conflicts and offline scenarios.
Pro tip: Show awareness of incremental sync and conflict resolution using vector clocks or CRDTs, and mention how to handle offline changes and sync when connectivity resumes.
Ask about consistency needs, expected latency, conflict frequency, and offline support to scope the solution.
Propose a central server with a database, and clients that sync via APIs and receive updates through push notifications (e.g., WebSocket, APNs, FCM).
Outline how clients fetch changes (e.g., delta sync with timestamps or version vectors) and push local changes, ensuring idempotency.
Discuss conflict resolution strategies (last-write-wins, CRDTs) and how to queue changes when offline and sync upon reconnection.
Mention scaling the server horizontally, using message queues, and ensuring data consistency and fault tolerance.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.