1. Change Data Capture intermediate

    A logistics platform needs its operational database changes to reach a search index and an analytics warehouse. An engineer proposes writing to all three from the application. What is wrong, and what is the alternative?

    2 min answer portercdcdual-writeoutbox
  2. Change Data Capture intermediate

    A marketplace's search index lags several minutes behind catalogue updates and sellers complain their listings appear stale. Compare synchronous indexing, CDC pipelines and read-after-write patching at query time.

    2 min answer marketplacesearchcdcindexing
  3. Chaos as a Test intermediate

    Leadership wants to start chaos engineering. What is your first experiment, and what must be true before you run anything?

    2 min answer chaosresiliencemethod
  4. Chaos Engineering intermediate

    A mobility platform wants to start chaos engineering. Its dispatch system is business-critical and the team is nervous. What is a responsible starting sequence, and what must exist first?

    2 min answer chaos-engineeringresilience-testingblast-radiusgrab
  5. Chaos Engineering intermediate

    A team wants to adopt chaos engineering after reading about it. What must be in place first, what is the correct progression, and what does chaos engineering not tell you?

    3 min answer netflixchaos-engineeringgame-daysresilience-testing
  6. Chunking & Retrieval intermediate

    A live assistant serves 1.8M documents chunked at a fixed 512 tokens with no overlap. You need to move to structure-aware chunks of about 900 tokens with 15% overlap and a newer embedding model, with no downtime and no quality regression. What is the sequence?

    3 min answer chunkingre-embeddingmigrationshadow-traffic
  7. Chunking & Retrieval intermediate

    Users report the assistant gets numbers wrong when answering from documents containing tables. Diagnose.

    2 min answer ragchunkingquality
  8. CI/CD intermediate

    Your monorepo runs 320 pipelines a day. Median wait before a runner picks up a job is 11 minutes; the pipeline itself takes 14. Finance asks whether doubling the runner pool is worth $9k a month. Work out the number that answers them.

    2 min answer ciqueueingdeveloper experiencecost
  9. Circuit Breakers intermediate Multiple choice

    A team proposes circuit breakers on every downstream call. What would you add, and why is the breaker not the most important control?

    2 min answer circuit-breakerbulkheadisolationfallback
  10. Circuit Breakers intermediate

    Your circuit breaker opens during normal traffic spikes, causing outages it was meant to prevent. How do you configure it correctly?

    2 min answer resiliencetuningfailure
  11. Clean Architecture intermediate Multiple choice

    A service calls a payment provider over HTTP. The provider occasionally returns 503 and occasionally times out. In a domain / application / adapter layering, which layer should own the retry and backoff policy?

    3 min answer clean architecturehexagonalretrieslayering
  12. Clean Architecture intermediate

    A team adopts a layered architecture with strict dependency rules and finds every small change touches many files. Is the architecture wrong, or the application of it?

    2 min answer clean-architecturelayersindirectionpragmatism