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2988 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 areas2988 Architecture Fundamentals91 Distributed Systems111 Data Architecture100 Cloud Architecture97 Networking96 API & Integration Architecture97 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

4 questions in Backward Compatibility.

  1. Backward Compatibility advanced

    Salesforce scheduled the retirement of Platform API versions 21.0 through 30.0 for the Summer '23 release and later postponed it to Summer '25, having retired versions 7.0 through 20.0 in Summer '22. After retirement, REST calls on a retired version return 410 Gone. What does a postponement of that size tell you about deprecation as a mechanism, and what would you build so that yours does not slip?

    3 min answer salesforcedeprecationapi versioningsunset
  2. Backward Compatibility intermediate

    What happens if an enterprise software vendor adds a required field to a widely-integrated interface, believing it is a minor change?

    2 min answer backward-compatibilitybreaking-changeintegrationenterprise
  3. Backward Compatibility beginner

    Your API returns a JSON object. Which of these changes can break a client you have never met: adding a field, removing a field, changing a field's type, adding a value to an enum, reordering keys, or making an optional field always present?

    3 min answer backward compatibilityjsonenumsparsers
  4. Backward Compatibility advanced

    Your public API has never made a breaking change by its own definition. In one release you reword an error message, start returning JSON object keys in a different order, and make a lookup 300 ms faster by caching it. Support tickets arrive from four integrators. What is the lesson, and what does an honest compatibility policy cost?

    3 min answer hyrums-lawimplicit-contractdeprecationapi-evolution