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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

2741 questions.

  1. 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
  2. Chunking & Retrieval advanced

    A retrieval system over code and documentation performs poorly. Which chunking decisions matter, and what is the common mistake?

    2 min answer chunkingretrievalstructurecontext
  3. Chunking & Retrieval advanced

    Review this ingestion pipeline. An HR assistant covers 4200 policy documents totalling about 9 million tokens. Ingestion runs a semantic chunker, generates three hypothetical questions per chunk and embeds those too, ensembles two embedding models, builds a knowledge graph of entity links, and adds a parent-document store. The nightly rebuild takes 11 hours and one engineer maintains all of it. Retrieval quality has never been measured. What would you remove and what would you keep?

    3 min answer ragingestionover-engineeringevaluation
  4. Chunking & Retrieval intermediate Multiple choice

    Review this retrieval setup. An assistant over a policy corpus retrieves the top 5 chunks. Users complain it cites the 2023 edition of a policy. Inspection shows the corpus holds about seven near-identical revisions of every document and the top 5 are usually five revisions of the same page. Which change would you make first?

    2 min answer chunking-retrievaldeduplicationversioningtop-k
  5. Chunking & Retrieval intermediate

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

    2 min answer ragchunkingquality
  6. Chunking & Retrieval beginner Multiple choice

    Users say the assistant's answers lack context, so a team proposes raising chunk size from 400 tokens to 1200 across a 60000-document policy corpus. Retrieval still returns the top 5 chunks. What is the dominant effect of that change?

    3 min answer chunkingretrievalembeddingsprecision
  7. CI/CD advanced

    A developer platform's CI system faces a burst of builds after a major release. How should queues, workers, caching and prioritisation prevent collapse?

    2 min answer ci-cdqueuesprioritisationcaching
  8. CI/CD advanced

    A team has a fully automated pipeline and still releases monthly. What is actually blocking them?

    2 min answer ci-cdbatch-sizebranchingfeature-flags
  9. CI/CD beginner

    A team's CI pipeline takes 40 minutes. Everyone agrees that is annoying but tolerable, because engineers do other work while they wait. Why does the 40 minutes change what engineers do rather than only how long they wait?

    2 min answer ci cdfeedback loopbatch sizeflaky tests
  10. 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
  11. Circuit Breakers advanced

    A card-processing platform's downstream authorisation network is slow but not failing - responses arrive, just far too late. Why does a standard error-rate circuit breaker not help, and what does?

    2 min answer marqetacircuit-breakerlatencybrownout
  12. Circuit Breakers advanced

    A grocery platform's retailer inventory API is slow but not failing - responses take 6 seconds instead of 200 ms, and mostly succeed. Should the circuit breaker open? Analyse the trade-off.

    2 min answer circuit-breakerslatencydegradationinstacart