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This is the first time I've seen someone set up a state transition diagram for the lifecycle of an entity under discussion, and seeing the state machine discussed first stood out to me, since the majority of folks would immediately dive into fleshing out the HLD : High level design. I also liked his thinking a brief timeout period between inventory selection and payments processing : modern-day ATM systems also behave in a similar fashion, since a long-lived time interval between both systems could suggest payment fraud or faulty systems.
Vending Machine is a perfect example of State Machine. I hope the interviewee can model the vending machine using state machine, which will be more better suited design in my opinion. Thank you for sharing. It's great.
Had this question asked in interview & I hadn't prepared for it cause it's not the usual system design question. Went with it by past user experience of a basic machine & wrote the tables for it, but the interviewer was adding complexity by making this to be an online system & wasn't satisfied with any answers. I thought what else could I have added, but I watched this & had gone with the exact flow. Guess some interviewers are not so great.
hash map should be used for low latency. Also, I thought this would be LLD/object oriented design but I see it's just flowchart and state diagram, is there a part 2 that's coming?
