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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

6 questions in First-Principles Reasoning.

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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