Portfolio ↗

Quiz

2741 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 areas2741 Architecture Fundamentals81 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture78 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication91 Enterprise Architecture91 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering84 Architecture Patterns84 Architecture Decision-Making91 The Architect's Meta-Skills92 Delivery & Release Engineering93 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data93 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture91 Edge, Mobile & IoT88 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture90 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

1018 questions.

  1. Hydration Cost intermediate Multiple choice

    An article page is server-rendered React. Field p75 interaction to next paint is 420 ms on mid-range Android and the main thread is busy for roughly 1.9 seconds after the HTML arrives. Three widgets account for most of the client bundle - a comment thread a video player and a recommendation carousel. Fewer than 5% of readers open comments. Which change gets interaction to next paint under 200 ms with the least risk?

    2 min answer hydrationinpislandscore-web-vitals
  2. IaC Modules & Drift intermediate

    An organisation's infrastructure code has become a sprawl of copied configurations. What module strategy works, and how is drift handled?

    2 min answer iacmodulesdriftreuse
  3. IaC Modules & Drift intermediate

    Your infrastructure drift detection fires 200 alerts a day. The team has muted it. How do you make it useful again?

    2 min answer iacdriftalerting
  4. Identity & Access Management intermediate

    Forty developers share one service account to access a partner API because the partner charges per credential. What do you do?

    2 min answer identityattributioncontrols
  5. Idempotency intermediate Multiple choice

    A marketplace checkout calls a payment API. Mobile clients on poor networks time out and retry, and some customers are charged twice. Where exactly must the deduplication record be written for this to be fixed?

    2 min answer idempotencyretriespaymentscorrectness
  6. Incident Management intermediate

    A payment platform is mid-incident: transactions are partially failing, the cause is unclear, and several teams are investigating. What structure makes the response effective?

    2 min answer razorpayincident-commandrolescommunication
  7. Incident Management intermediate Multiple choice

    An incident is underway and everyone is debugging. What role is missing?

    1 min answer incident-managementrolescoordinationcommunication
  8. Incident Management intermediate

    An observability platform's incident process treats all incidents with the same severity and process. What problems does this create, and how should severity be defined?

    2 min answer incident-managementseverityescalationdatadog
  9. Incident Management intermediate

    You are incident commander. Error rate is 8% and rising, cause unknown. What do you do in the first ten minutes?

    2 min answer incidentcommandmitigationcommunication
  10. Security Incident Response intermediate

    At 09:00 a customer reports that a report they exported contains another customer's records. You have the on-call. Walk me through your first hour, and tell me what architectural question you would ask on day two.

    3 min answer incident responsemulti-tenancycontainmentforensics
  11. Indexing intermediate Multiple choice

    A query filters on `lower(email)` and there is an index on `email`. The query is slow and the plan shows a sequential scan. Why, and what are the fixes?

    2 min answer indexingquery-plandebuggingdatabase
  12. Indexing intermediate

    A table has 14 indexes and writes have become slow. How do you decide which to remove?

    2 min answer indexingwrite-performancereview