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Quiz

2948 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 areas2948 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems101 Data Architecture90 Cloud Architecture87 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture87 Reliability & Resilience99 Observability92 Performance & Capacity Engineering100 Security Architecture105 Cost Architecture & FinOps102 Business Architecture103 Architecture Communication102 Enterprise Architecture100 Legacy Modernization102 AI-Era Architecture106 Software Architecture & Engineering93 Architecture Patterns94 Architecture Decision-Making101 The Architect's Meta-Skills102 Delivery & Release Engineering103 Platform Engineering & Developer Experience102 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

2948 questions.

  1. Model Selection advanced

    A team enables speculative decoding with a small draft model to cut inter-token latency on a chat product. What does it buy, what does it cost, and at what point does it stop helping?

    3 min answer speculative decodinginference latencybatchingacceptance rate
  2. Model Selection intermediate

    Your music recommender uses collaborative filtering. Newly released tracks are never recommended. Why, and what do you do?

    2 min answer spotifyrecommendationscold-startensemble
  3. Modernisation Business Case intermediate

    A modernisation programme cannot get funded because its benefits are technical. How should the case be made?

    2 min answer gustobusiness-casefundingevidence
  4. Modernisation Business Case advanced

    A programme plans an 18-month coexistence period during which the legacy platform and its replacement both serve production. Roughly what does the coexistence itself cost, on top of building the replacement, and which assumption dominates the estimate?

    3 min answer estimationcoexistencedual runbusiness case
  5. Modernisation Business Case intermediate

    An architect must justify continued investment in a modernisation programme after eighteen months with the end state not yet reached. What should the argument be?

    2 min answer business-caseincremental-valueevidencesponsorship
  6. Modernisation Business Case advanced

    Make the case for modernising a system that works reliably and is expensive to change.

    2 min answer business-caseevidenceriskopportunity-cost
  7. Modernisation Business Case advanced

    The US Internal Revenue Service began developing CADE 2 in 2009 to replace the Individual Master File, its authoritative record of individual taxpayer accounts, which the Government Accountability Office described as 60 years old and programmed in assembly language. GAO reported that a key milestone slipped nine years from 2014 to 2023, that cost, schedule and scope goals were revised seven times between 2016 and 2019, that development cost is roughly four times the original plan, that the programme now expects to replace only core components, and that in June 2021 the IRS planned full retirement of the master file by 2030. What produced that pattern, and what should a private-sector programme take from it?

    3 min answer gaoirscade 2mainframe
  8. Modernisation Business Case advanced

    You need funding for eighteen months of platform work with no customer-visible features. How do you build the case?

    1 min answer business-caseplatformfunding
  9. Modular Monolith intermediate

    A checkout path makes 40 calls across module boundaries to render one page. Roughly what does that path cost in a modular monolith versus the same modules extracted as services in one availability zone, and what does the number tell you about where to draw boundaries?

    3 min answer modular-monolithmicroserviceslatency-budgetcall-amplification
  10. Modular Monolith intermediate

    A product team of fifteen engineers must choose between a modular monolith and services. What should decide it?

    2 min answer loommodular-monolithboundariesteam-size
  11. Modular Monolith advanced

    A productivity app keeps a full local database on each client and syncs deltas with the server. Why would a small team choose this over conventional REST, and how are optimistic updates, conflicts, permission changes and client schema migrations handled?

    3 min answer linearsync-engineoffline-firstoptimistic-updates
  12. Modular Monolith intermediate

    A team adopts a modular monolith. What must they do forever, and what happens if they stop?

    2 min answer modular-monolithenforcementciboundaries