Imagine this: You’re building some kind of a chat system. For every message from the user, you want to figure out what the message is about. Is the user asking a question? Or does the user asking to perform a specific action? Or is the user talking about something completely irrelevant to your system?

What we are doing here is detecting the “intent” of the user’s message. Think of the intent as a set of predefined categories like QUESTION, ACTION1, ACTION2, OUT_OF_DOMAIN.

I’ve recently been spending some time improving my understanding of distributed systems.

YouTube is now the de facto way I learn new things, so that’s where I naturally started. There are definitely some great channels on YouTube (see my recommendation list below), but the vast majority of videos related to this topic on YT are quite terrible. In general, they tend to be focussed on people who are preparing for System Design interviews and not for people who simply want to learn how to build better systems. This leads to videos that are shiny and appear useful, but barely scratch the surface in terms of what you need to actually implement those concepts in practice. In fact, even if your goal is to crack a bunch of interviews, a vast majority of these videos will only help you crack a SDE-2 level interview. They lack any kind of depth or nuance necessary for senior or staff level interviews.

Are you planning to use Go for solving coding problems in an upcoming interview? If so, you might have realized that the language feels a little “unergonomic” for quickly implementing algorithms under the time constraints imposed by an interview.

Unlike the real world, in a coding interview lack of conciseness and excess boilerplate gets in the way of finishing the solution in time and being able to communicate your ideas with the interviewer effectively.