Code RoomReal-time collaborative editing
HardPrep Room Coding #3137

Real-time collaborative editing

System designDistributed systemsSenior–Staff~50 min

Design the real-time collaborative editing engine for a shared rich-text document (think Google Docs / Notion page) where up to ~100 people can edit simultaneously, including offline editing that syncs on reconnect. Requirements: everyone's view converges to the same final document, no edit is silently lost, latency feels instant locally, and the document survives a server restart. Discuss your concurrency-control approach and its trade-offs.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts (data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes) and name the trade-offs you are making.

Clarify5:30 left
Estimate5:30 planned
Design16:30 planned
Deep dive13:30 planned
Failure9:00 planned
0:00
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