Design Google Docs (Collaborative Editing)
Design a real-time collaborative document editor like Google Docs where 1B+ users can co-edit the same document with sub-200 ms latency, never lose a keystroke, and converge to the same state across all clients regardless of network conditions. The interview centerpiece is concurrency control: how to merge two users' simultaneous edits without conflicts. We compare Operational Transformation (OT, used by Google Docs) and Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT, used by Figma, Notion, Linear), explain the convergence problem (TP1, TP2 properties), walk through cursor presence, and design the document storage as an append-only operation log compacted into snapshots.
System Design
Hard
design-collaborative-editor
case-study
unique-specialized
google-docs
collaborative-editing
operational-transform
crdt
real-time-sync
websockets
presence
vector-clock
event-sourcing
consistency-models
system-design
advanced
premium
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