# Alex Xu & Sahn Lam

> Alex Xu and Sahn Lam are the co-founders of ByteByteGo, the premier technical education platform for system design. Together they built a newsletter with 1M+ subscribers, a YouTube channel with 500K+ subscribers, a GitHub repo with 82K+ stars, and a bestselling book series used by engineers at every major tech company to crack system design interviews. Alex, a CMU grad and former engineer at Twitter, Apple, and Zynga, handles the newsletter, books, and social media. Sahn, a UC Berkeley EECS grad and 25-year veteran of NetApp, Zynga, Ubiquity6, and Discord, leads YouTube content creation. Together they've turned a niche interview-prep subject into a global movement.

- **Role:** Co-Founders at ByteByteGo
- **Organizations:** ByteByteGo
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** M.S. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), University of California, Berkeley
- **Known for:** Founded ByteByteGo, reaching 1M+ newsletter subscribers in just over 2 years, system-design-101 GitHub repo reached 82,200+ stars - one of the fastest-growing repos in GitHub history (18K stars in 4 days), System Design Interview Vol. 1 hit #1 on Amazon and was translated into 6 languages

## Career timeline

- **pre-2010** — Alex Xu: Software Engineer at Oracle
- **pre-2010** — Sahn Lam: Software Engineer at NetApp (enterprise storage management)
- **2010** — Sahn Lam joins Zynga as Senior Architect - hand-picked by CTO for highest-stakes engineering challenges
- **2012** — Alex Xu joins Zynga as Software Engineer
- **2014** — Alex Xu: Software Engineer at Apple
- **2016** — Alex Xu: Software Engineer at Twitter
- **2018** — Sahn Lam joins Ubiquity6 as Senior Architect (AR/VR large-scale systems)
- **2020** — Alex Xu self-publishes 'System Design Interview - An Insider's Guide Vol. 1' - Amazon #1 bestseller
- **2021** — Ubiquity6 acquired by Discord; Sahn Lam becomes Staff Software Engineer at Discord
- **2022** — ByteByteGo newsletter launched on Substack (April 2, 2022)
- **2022** — System Design Interview Vol. 2 published (co-authored by Alex Xu and Sahn Lam)
- **2022** — system-design-101 GitHub repo launched - reaches 18,000 stars in 4 days
- **2023** — ByteByteGo reaches 440,000 YouTube subscribers and 500,000+ newsletter subscribers
- **2023** — Machine Learning System Design Interview book published
- **2024** — ByteByteGo surpasses 1 million newsletter subscribers
- **2024** — Generative AI System Design Interview book published (November 2024)
- **2024** — system-design-101 GitHub repo surpasses 82,200 stars

## Achievements

- Founded ByteByteGo, reaching 1M+ newsletter subscribers in just over 2 years
- system-design-101 GitHub repo reached 82,200+ stars - one of the fastest-growing repos in GitHub history (18K stars in 4 days)
- System Design Interview Vol. 1 hit #1 on Amazon and was translated into 6 languages
- Built a 2M+ multi-platform audience across newsletter, YouTube, social media
- YouTube channel reached 500,000+ subscribers
- Co-authored 4 bestselling technical books: System Design Interview Vol. 1 & 2, ML System Design Interview, GenAI System Design Interview
- Alex Xu: Former engineer at Twitter, Apple, Zynga, Oracle with 10+ years large-scale systems experience
- Sahn Lam: 25-year engineering veteran at NetApp, Zynga (8 years), Ubiquity6, Discord
- Created a subscription platform used by engineers at every major tech company for interview prep

## Latest updates

- **2024-11** — Published Generative AI System Design Interview book (co-authored with Ali Aminian and Hao Sheng)
- **2024-06** — ByteByteGo surpasses 1 million newsletter subscribers
- **2024-01** — system-design-101 GitHub repo reaches 82,200+ stars
- **2023-07** — ByteByteGo YouTube reaches 440,000+ subscribers in first year
- **2023-01** — Machine Learning System Design Interview book published

## Links

- Website: https://bytebytego.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexxubyte/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/alexxubyte
- GitHub: https://github.com/ByteByteGoHq
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ByteByteGo
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexxubyte/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/alex-xu-sahn-lam
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-29