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Quiz

2868 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 areas2868 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking86 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering90 Security Architecture95 Cost Architecture & FinOps92 Business Architecture93 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization92 AI-Era Architecture96 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience92 Testing & Quality Architecture102 Data Platform Architecture98 Streaming & Real-Time Data103 Data Governance & Semantics91 Frontend & Experience Architecture101 Edge, Mobile & IoT98 Regulatory & Data Protection Architecture99 Assurance, Audit & Model Risk98
Difficulty Any beginner intermediate advanced

2868 questions.

  1. Medallion Architecture intermediate

    A team adopts bronze/silver/gold layering and every layer becomes a copy of the previous one with minor changes. What should each layer actually guarantee?

    2 min answer medallionlayeringdata-qualitycontracts
  2. Medallion Architecture beginner

    A team proposes bronze, silver and gold layers for a pipeline that ingests one CSV daily and produces one report. Is that right?

    2 min answer pragmatismlayeringdesign
  3. Medallion Architecture intermediate

    What does a layered bronze-silver-gold structure actually buy, and where does it become ceremony?

    2 min answer medallionlayersreprocessingquality
  4. Mentoring intermediate Multiple choice

    An architecture guild's charter - a monthly 60-minute meeting with a rotating presenter and the stated purpose of sharing knowledge and aligning on best practice - tracks attendance as its success metric and produces no decisions and no artefacts. Twenty months in nothing about how services are built has changed. Which single change to the charter is most likely to change the estate?

    3 min answer mentoringguildjudgementreview
  5. Mentoring intermediate Multiple choice

    An engineer you mentor proposes a design that will work but is not the one you would choose: a single queue with a database-backed dedupe table where you would have used the broker's own idempotent producer. They have thought it through. You are reviewing it. What should you do?

    2 min answer mentoringreviewjudgementreversibility
  6. Mentoring advanced

    How do you develop architectural judgement in an engineer, as opposed to reviewing their designs?

    2 min answer mentoringjudgementscalingquestions
  7. Mentoring intermediate

    How does an architect develop architectural judgement in others rather than just answering their questions?

    2 min answer mentoringjudgementreasoningdelegation
  8. Message Formats intermediate

    A mobile client sends event times as "2027-03-28T02:30:00" with no offset. Nightly reporting has always been slightly off for European users, and on one Sunday in March about 40 minutes of events vanish from the daily rollup while a different Sunday in October shows some events twice. Diagnose it.

    3 min answer timestampsrfc3339time-zonesdst
  9. Message Formats advanced

    A producer team wants to rename a field in a published event schema. What do you tell them and what makes the answer enforceable?

    2 min answer schema-registrycompatibilityavrolinkedin
  10. Message Formats intermediate Multiple choice

    A telemetry platform ingests billions of events daily from customer agents. Which message format should the wire protocol use, and what does the choice affect beyond size?

    2 min answer serialisationprotobufschema-evolutioncompression
  11. Message Formats intermediate Multiple choice

    An events pipeline carries 2 billion events a day. Each event is JSON with 25 fields whose names average 14 characters. Roughly how many bytes a day go on field names alone, before compression?

    2 min answer message formatsjsonprotobufcompression
  12. Messaging & Queues advanced

    A flash sale causes an incident. Two hours later the fault is fixed but 4 million jobs are backed up and notifications are hours late. Walk through recovery and prevention.

    3 min answer queuesbackpressureshopifyincident