Notion Engineering
Engineering blog from Notion covering data modeling, Postgres sharding, WASM performance, and API design.
Overview
Notion is built on an unusual block-based data model where every paragraph, page, and database row is the same primitive, which makes flexibility easy for users and scaling hard for engineers. The blog's most distinctive content covers exactly that: the recursive block schema and how it shapes every query, two consecutive Postgres sharding migrations done online for one of the most write-heavy workloads in SaaS, and a client-side architecture that ships WASM SQLite to the browser to keep large workspaces responsive. For interviews, 'Lessons learned from sharding Postgres at Notion' and 'The Great Re-shard: adding Postgres capacity with zero downtime' together form one of the best published case studies on online relational resharding, and 'The data model behind Notion's flexibility' is excellent for data-modeling questions.
Interview questions
- What can I learn from Notion's engineering blog?
- Which Notion posts are most useful for online-resharding interviews?
- Why is Notion's data model post valuable for system design interviews?
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