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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. Technical Leadership intermediate

    What distinguishes technical leadership from technical seniority, and how is it measured?

    2 min answer leadershipscalejudgementdelegation
  2. Technical Leadership advanced

    You are the first architect at a 200-engineer company with no architecture function. What do you do in the first three months?

    3 min answer leadershipinfluenceassessmentgovernance
  3. Technical Leadership advanced

    You join a platform group and find four teams have each written their own retry-and-backoff library, with different defaults, and a fifth team has none. Everyone knows this is duplicated. Nobody has consolidated it. What is the diagnosis, and what do you change?

    3 min answer platformduplicationincentivesconways-law
  4. Trade-off Analysis advanced

    A SaaS vendor's documented recovery posture is point-in-time restore for any individual data store. Atlassian's April 2022 incident tested it at scale - sites for 775 customers were deleted at once, no customer lost more than five minutes of data, and the last sites came back on 18 April. Which number had the organisation actually been buying, and what would you change first?

    3 min answer atlassianrportodisaster-recovery
  5. Trade-off Analysis advanced

    Dropbox moved file storage off Amazon S3 onto its own infrastructure - Magic Pocket - completing the migration in 2016. What did that decision buy and what did it pay, and which facts about your own situation would have to be true before the same move is defensible?

    3 min answer dropboxbuild-vs-buyunit-economicsstorage
  6. Trade-off Analysis advanced

    Product requires strong consistency and p99 latency under 100 ms for a globally distributed user base. Both are non-negotiable. What do you do?

    2 min answer tradeoffsconsistencyrequirements
  7. Trade-off Analysis intermediate

    What distinguishes strong trade-off analysis from weak analysis in practice?

    2 min answer tradeoffscriteriajudgementrecommendation
  8. Trade-off Analysis advanced

    When Notion sharded its Postgres database in 2021 it created 480 logical shards spread across 32 physical instances, 15 per host. In 2023 it moved to 96 hosts with 5 logical shards each, keeping the same 480. What did the original choice buy, what did it cost, and what would you have had to believe to choose 32 logical shards instead?

    3 min answer notionshardingreversibilitycapacity