Is software system design on topic for the software development site?

For what I mean by system design, consider the "system design interview" commonly held these days when recruiting software engineers. I assume a software site would primarily deal with software systems, rather than things like airplane controls, chemical oscillators and manufacturing assembly lines.

For some examples:

• One might ask in the main QA section: "I want to have real time ML inference, but my database is OLAP and the performance is crap. Is there a way to fix it, or do I have to switch to an OLTP data store?"
• One might ask in the code review section: "I want to make a multiplayer game. Here are the detailed requirements. Here is my design for how the different parts will come together. Are there any flaws or shortcomings in this design?"

Informally, people think of sites like this as "coding questions". But many interesting questions and problems in software development are really questions about system design. Once a suitable software system is designed, implementation becomes obvious.

posted about 2 months ago

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matthewsnyder‭

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