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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

92 questions in Meta-Skills.

  1. Ethics in Architecture advanced

    Which architectural decisions carry ethical consequences, and what is the architect's professional responsibility?

    2 min answer ethicsdata-minimisationaccessibilitytransparency
  2. Failure Thinking intermediate

    A major platform launch is three months away. How would you run a pre-mortem, and why bother?

    2 min answer riskfacilitationmeta-skills
  3. Failure Thinking advanced

    Between August and early September 2025 three separate infrastructure bugs degraded Claude's output quality - one affected 16% of Sonnet 4 requests in the worst hour of 31 August - while error rates and latency stayed normal. What class of failure is this, and what would you have had to build beforehand to notice it?

    2 min answer anthropicsilent-failuredetectionquality-regression
  4. Failure Thinking advanced

    What does it mean to design by thinking about failure first, and what does that produce that requirement-driven design does not?

    2 min answer credfailure-modesdesignpremortem
  5. Failure Thinking advanced

    What does it mean to think in failure modes as a habit rather than as a checklist item, and which questions consistently produce findings?

    3 min answer failure-modesdesign-reviewresiliencequestions
  6. Failure Thinking advanced

    What questions characterise failure thinking, and which are most often skipped in design reviews?

    2 min answer failure-thinkingreviewdependenciesdegradation
  7. First-Principles Reasoning beginner

    A product manager asks for a 25 ms round-trip response time for users in London talking to a service in New York, arguing that a faster network provider would deliver it. Roughly what is the physical floor, and what does the answer let you do?

    3 min answer latencyphysicsfirst-principlesestimation
  8. First-Principles Reasoning advanced

    A team says 200 ms is the minimum achievable latency for an operation. How would you check?

    2 min answer first-principleslatencyassumptionsphysics
  9. First-Principles Reasoning intermediate

    A vendor's datastore is documented at one million writes per second. Your cluster does 40000 writes per second and p99 write latency is 900 ms. Nothing is erroring. Work from first principles - where do the claim and your reality diverge?

    2 min answer first-principlesbenchmarkswrite-amplificationdurability
  10. First-Principles Reasoning intermediate

    An architect faces a problem that resembles a known pattern but does not quite fit. How should first-principles reasoning and pattern recognition be combined?

    2 min answer zeptofirst-principlespatternsjudgement
  11. First-Principles Reasoning advanced

    When is first-principles reasoning the right tool for an architect, and when is it a waste of time?

    2 min answer first-principlesphysicsassumptionsjudgement
  12. First-Principles Reasoning advanced

    When should an architect reason from first principles and when should they pattern-match to known solutions? What goes wrong with each?

    2 min answer first-principlespatternsjudgementnovelty