Search the practice set

term

Trunk-Based Development

All developers integrating small changes into a single shared branch at least daily, with long-lived branches avoided entirely.

Software Architecture term

Cell-Based Architecture

Partitioning a service into complete, independent copies of itself, each serving a subset of customers, so a failure is bounded to one cell.

Architecture Patterns term

Credit-Based Flow Control

A scheme where a receiver grants the sender a budget of bytes or messages it may transmit, replenished as the receiver consumes.

Backpressure & Flow Control term

Log-Based CDC

Capturing changes by reading the database's own write-ahead log, which sees every change with no load on the source and no application involvement.

Change Data Capture term

Query-Based CDC

Detecting changes by repeatedly querying for rows modified since the last run — simple, universally available, and lossy in specific ways.

Change Data Capture term

Admission Control

Deciding at the edge whether to accept a request at all, based on current capacity, before any work is done on it.

Load Shedding term

CI/CD

Merging work continuously into a shared trunk with automated verification, and keeping every commit in a state that could be released.

Software Architecture term

Canary Release

Routing a small fraction of traffic to a new version, watching its metrics, and expanding or rolling back based on what they show.

Software Architecture term

Delivery vs Maintainability

Choosing where to take deliberate shortcuts, based on which kinds of debt are cheap to repay and which compound.

Architecture Decision-Making term

Write Skew

An anomaly where two transactions each read a set of rows, make disjoint writes based on what they read, and together violate an invariant neither could have broken alone.

Transactions & Isolation

quiz

Your JWT-based auth means a fired employee keeps access for 15 minutes after their account is disabled. Security says that is unacceptable. What are the options?

Why the gap exists A signed JWT is validated locally from its signature. That is the whole benefit — no network call, no shared session store, resource servers

Tokens & JWTs

topic

Trunk-Based Development

Short-lived branches, and unmerged work as inventory.

Software Architecture & Engineering — no content yet topic

Career Development

Growing from senior engineer to architect and beyond.

The Architect's Meta-Skills — no content yet topic

Cell-Based Architecture

Complete isolated copies each serving a subset of customers.

Architecture Patterns — no content yet topic

Alerting

Symptom-based, actionable, user-impacting — and linked to a runbook.

Observability — no content yet topic

Identity & Access Management

Workload identity, roles, permission boundaries and usage-based review.

4 items topic

Sampling

Head-based versus tail-based, and keeping the traces that matter.

Observability — no content yet