Learning system design gives you some mind-blowing realizations that completely change how you see problem-solving. Take string matching, for example.

As normal DSA problem solvers, our first approach? Two pointers, brute force, comparing character by character. Works fine in coding problems, but imagine doing this at big data scale—scanning indexes, performing expensive comparisons—it’s a nightmare!

But system design flips the game. Instead of direct comparisons, convert strings to hashes. Computational operations are insanely fast these days, so why not? For example, a naive approach could be summing up ASCII values and then just comparing this one value rather than comparing all (n) values (just an example, don’t come at me with collisions 😆). But more sophisticated techniques like Rolling Hashes, Bloom Filters, and Merkle Trees make large-scale string operations efficient.

At scale, these optimizations save millions in compute costs and make systems lightning fast. System design really changes how you think! 🔥