The 2019 field guide to production ML that spawned a book
A free booklet and interview question bank for ML engineers who need to think beyond notebooks.

What it does This repository hosts a 2019 booklet that maps the full lifecycle of a production machine learning system: project setup, data pipelines, model selection and debugging, then testing, deployment, and maintenance. It also serves as an interview prep tool, with 27 open-ended systems design questions and community-contributed answers.
The interesting bit The author is transparent that this is an early draft superseded by her 2022 O’Reilly book, which turns the repo into a free, lightweight time capsule. The interview question bank remains a practical draw, especially since the answers are crowdsourced directly in the repository.
Key highlights
- End-to-end coverage: setup, data, modeling, and serving
- 27 open-ended ML systems design interview questions with community answers
- Curated links to real-world case studies from major tech companies
- Explicitly positioned as the precursor to the more comprehensive Designing Machine Learning Systems
- Published as HTML via the
magicbooktoolchain
Caveats
- The author states her understanding has evolved significantly since 2019
- Described as less comprehensive and up-to-date than the 2022 O’Reilly book
Verdict
Worth bookmarking for free interview prep and a quick survey of production ML concerns. If you want the current, expanded treatment, the author points to the dmls-book repository instead.
Frequently asked
- What is chiphuyen/machine-learning-systems-design?
- A free booklet and interview question bank for ML engineers who need to think beyond notebooks.
- Is machine-learning-systems-design open source?
- Yes — chiphuyen/machine-learning-systems-design is an open-source project tracked on heatdrop.
- What language is machine-learning-systems-design written in?
- chiphuyen/machine-learning-systems-design is primarily written in HTML.
- How popular is machine-learning-systems-design?
- chiphuyen/machine-learning-systems-design has 10.5k stars on GitHub.
- Where can I find machine-learning-systems-design?
- chiphuyen/machine-learning-systems-design is on GitHub at https://github.com/chiphuyen/machine-learning-systems-design.