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Quiz

2667 questions of the kind that actually get asked — in interviews, in architecture review boards, and by the person who has to run the thing at 3 AM. Every answer states the trade-off rather than the slogan, and says when the obvious choice is the wrong one.

All areas2667 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience88 Observability81 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture86 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture90 Data Platform Architecture88 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics81 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk88
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

130 questions.

  1. Mobile App Architecture beginner Multiple choice

    A delivery app marks a parcel delivered. The phone is on a weak connection: the request reaches the server, the response is lost, and the app retries. The customer is charged twice and the parcel is marked delivered twice. Which change fixes this properly?

    2 min answer idempotencyretriesmobileat-least-once
  2. Mobile App Architecture beginner

    A mobile client stamps each event with its own clock and the server stores that timestamp. Why does this break reporting and de-duplication, and what should the server record instead?

    2 min answer clocksevent-timeidempotencyoffline
  3. Mobile Release Strategy beginner Multiple choice

    A mobile app ships a release with a defect that crashes on launch for users in one country. The team is confident because the release included a remote kill switch for the new feature. It does not help. Which mistake does this most likely reflect?

    3 min answer kill-switchfeature-flagsmobilestartup
  4. Model Documentation beginner

    A team is asked to produce documentation for a model that scores loan applications. They propose a technical write-up of the architecture and the training data. What is missing, who actually reads this document, and what is it not?

    2 min answer model-cardsdocumentationgovernanceintended-use
  5. Network Security beginner

    A security questionnaire asks whether data is encrypted in transit and the team answers yes because the load balancer serves TLS 1.3. What happens if an attacker gets code execution on one host behind that load balancer, and what has the TLS answer actually bought?

    2 min answer tlsterminationmtlslateral-movement
  6. Non-Functional Test Strategy beginner

    A requirements document says "the system must be highly available and performant". How do you turn that into something testable?

    2 min answer nfrrequirementstesting
  7. OAuth 2.0 & OIDC beginner Multiple choice

    A mobile client sends its OAuth access token as `?access_token=...` because an intermediate proxy strips the Authorization header. Six weeks later the live token values appear in a CDN edge log that 60 engineers can query and in a partner's referrer report. Which change actually closes this?

    3 min answer oauthbearer-tokenloggingtoken-leakage
  8. Open Table Formats beginner

    Your team already writes compressed Parquet files to object storage and queries them with a SQL engine. An engineer proposes moving the same files to Iceberg. The bytes on disk barely change, so what does the table format actually add?

    2 min answer icebergparquettable-formatmetadata
  9. Organisational Constraints beginner Multiple choice

    You are designing a new order-management service for a mid-size retailer. Four facts about the organisation come up in the first week. Which one changes what you are allowed to design, as opposed to merely making the work slower or less pleasant?

    3 min answer organisational constraintson-calloperabilitydesign drivers
  10. Physical-World Failure Modes beginner Multiple choice

    A courier fleet of 8000 phones sends one location update every 5 seconds while on shift, 8 hours a day. Each update is about 400 bytes on the wire including headers on a reused connection. Roughly how much cellular data is that per device per month?

    3 min answer estimationtelemetrybatterybatching
  11. Pipeline Architecture beginner Multiple choice

    A team's pipeline builds the artifact separately for each environment because "the config differs". What is wrong, and what do you propose?

    2 min answer cdartifactsconfiguration
  12. Pipeline Secrets beginner

    A build script echoes a deployment token into the pipeline log. The log is private to the engineering team. Is the token compromised?

    2 min answer secretsci-cdrotationblast-radius