Breaking it down: The magic of multipart file uploads
Few years ago, I was asked to design a system that handles large file uploads in an interview. I was a mid-level software engineer and hadn’t tackled this problem before.
I had only used applications that handled file uploads like Gmail, Instagram etc. Since the user experience is seamless, I thought the problem would also be simple.
So, I went to the drawing board, sketched a couple of APIs, and boxes and told the interviewer that I am done. I found that it’s been only 10 minutes since the interview started. ⏲️
But wait, aren’t tech design rounds supposed to last an hour ? I became skeptical and told the interviewer that I needed his help.
Although I wasn’t able to crack the interview but it gave me immense learnings and I was amazed at the elegant engineering behind large file uploads.
In this article, we will understand the internals of large file uploads. We will learn the high-level architecture, practical applications and different edge cases.
