News feed: push it, pull it, or both?
One strong interview answer to "design a news feed": fan-out on write for ordinary authors, pull for celebrities above a follower threshold, feeds that hold only post IDs while each post object lives once, cursor pagination that stays correct while new posts arrive, a 200 ms read path, and how to survive a lost cache shard or a celebrity hot key.
01 · The fan-out question
IP-07 · Design a News Feed
One post. Millions of feeds.
Post once, seen by millions
Design the Facebook news feed, or the Twitter timeline.
0:00 / 13:03