PRISM product video: “The whiteboard”
A 52-second film we made for PRISM, a system design interview simulator.
The story
A candidate freezes when the interviewer asks what breaks at 50,000 requests a second. That night they run the design in PRISM's simulation engine, watch the database, the load balancer and the servers give out, fix each one, and walk into the next interview ready.
Why it works
It opens on the moment its users dread: freezing when the interviewer asks what breaks at 50,000 requests a second. That night the simulation engine does the work on screen, failing the database, the load balancer and the servers one by one, so the product's mechanism is the story rather than a feature list.
What it says
- 0:00Black Friday. 50,000 requests a second.
- 0:02What breaks first?
- 0:05Nothing fails on a whiteboard.
- 0:08That night, PRISM's simulation engine sends 50,000 requests a second through it.
- 0:14Everything fails under load.
- 0:17PRISM shows why it broke, and what to change.
- 0:21PRISM finds it. You fix it. Run it again.
- 0:31Until it holds.
- 0:34Scored on the five things interviewers check.
- 0:3950,000 requests a second. What breaks first?
- 0:42This time, they know.
- 0:44Nice. Walk me through the tradeoff.
- 0:47Learn system design by watching it break.
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