Interview Practice
1232 cards pulled from the notes. See the question, answer it, reveal, then rate yourself. A weak run sends the topic back to the start of the revision ladder; a good one moves it up.
Due for revisionEvery question from the topics due today, capped at your daily revision target, plus cards due on their own schedule.
Estimation drillsBack of the envelope numbers for system design: storage, requests per second, bandwidth, servers, cache and chat messages.
5 new problems a round. Within 2x of the exact answer is spot on, within 10x is close enough.
Start- UML Class Diagrams: Reading and Drawing the Boxes10 questionsNot practised
- Coupling and Cohesion7 questionsNot practised
- Strings and immutability6 questionsNot practised
- Memory, pass by value and garbage collection6 questionsNot practised
- Optional and null handling6 questionsNot practised
- Records, sealed classes and pattern matching7 questionsNot practised
Mixed run across SQL (27 questions)
- SRP - The Single Responsibility Principle6 questionsNot practised
- OCP - The Open/Closed Principle6 questionsNot practised
- LSP - The Liskov Substitution Principle7 questionsNot practised
- Interface Segregation Principle (ISP)6 questionsNot practised
- Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)7 questionsNot practised
- Beyond SOLID: DRY, KISS, YAGNI and Friends7 questionsNot practised
- Bridge Pattern: Two Things That Change, Kept Apart7 questionsNot practised
- Structural Design Patterns: Master Comparison4 questionsNot practised
- Mediator Pattern: Talk to the Hub, Not to Each Other7 questionsNot practised
- Visitor Pattern: Add New Operations Without Touching Your Classes7 questionsNot practised
- Interpreter Pattern: Turn Business Rules into a Tiny Language7 questionsNot practised
- Behavioural Patterns Summary7 questionsNot practised
- Design Splitwise (Low Level Design)5 questionsNot practised
- Design an LRU Cache (Low Level Design)6 questionsNot practised
- Design a Rate Limiter (Low Level Design)7 questionsNot practised
- Design a Logging Framework (Low Level Design)6 questionsNot practised
- Design a Pub/Sub Message Broker (Low Level Design)7 questionsNot practised
- Design a Meeting Room Booking System (Low Level Design)9 questionsNot practised
Mixed run across React Machine Coding (16 questions)
- How to Approach a System Design Interview4 questionsNot practised
- Back of the Envelope Estimation5 questionsNot practised
- Caching4 questionsNot practised
- Load Balancing5 questionsNot practised
- Consistent Hashing5 questionsNot practised
- Message Queues and Streams4 questionsNot practised
- Choosing a Database, and How Indexes Work5 questionsNot practised
- Sharding and Partitioning5 questionsNot practised
- Replication and Failover5 questionsNot practised
- CDNs4 questionsNot practised
- Idempotency and Retries5 questionsNot practised
- Proxies and API Gateways4 questionsNot practised
- Introduction to Forward Deployed Engineering and GenAI Foundations8 questionsNot practised
- How Large Language Models Work12 questionsNot practised
- Talking to an LLM from Your Application9 questionsNot practised
- Building a Chatbot: Context, Memory, Streaming and Hallucinations10 questionsNot practised
- Introduction to AI Agents: Tools, Tool Calling and the Agent Loop9 questionsNot practised
- Streaming AI Responses: From Tokens to a Live Chat10 questionsNot practised
- Vector Embeddings from First Principles11 questionsNot practised
- Vector Search: Brute Force KNN and the Indexing Problem8 questionsNot practised
- Vector Databases and ANN: IVF, HNSW and Product Quantization12 questionsNot practised
- Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG): Chunking, Retrieval and Citations8 questionsNot practised
- Advanced RAG: Chunking, Hybrid Search and Reranking8 questions, 10 flashcardsNot practised
- Structured Output: Typed JSON From an LLM8 questionsNot practised
- Model Context Protocol (MCP): Hosts, Clients and Servers17 questionsNot practised
- MCP Beyond Tools: Resources and Prompts9 questionsNot practised
- Multimodal Vision Chat: Sending Images to an LLM15 questionsNot practised
- GenAI Evals: How to Know Your AI App Works8 questionsNot practised
- Testing an AI Agent: Deterministic Evals and LLM-as-a-Judge15 questionsNot practised
- GenAI Security and Guardrails: Prompt Injection, Jailbreaks and Safe Tool Use16 questionsNot practised
- Trade-Offs in Data Systems Architecture12 questions, 26 flashcardsNot practised
- Defining Nonfunctional Requirements12 questions, 30 flashcardsNot practised
- Data Models and Query Languages12 questions, 36 flashcardsNot practised
- Storage and Retrieval12 questions, 39 flashcardsNot practised
- Encoding and Evolution12 questions, 36 flashcardsNot practised
- Replication12 questions, 40 flashcardsNot practised
- Sharding12 questions, 30 flashcardsNot practised
- Transactions12 questions, 42 flashcardsNot practised
- The Trouble with Distributed Systems12 questions, 41 flashcardsNot practised
- Consistency and Consensus12 questions, 41 flashcardsNot practised
- Batch Processing12 questions, 43 flashcardsNot practised
- Stream Processing12 questions, 47 flashcardsNot practised
- A Philosophy of Streaming Systems13 questions, 43 flashcardsNot practised
- Doing the Right Thing12 questions, 31 flashcardsNot practised
- DDIA Master Revision Sheet46 flashcardsNot practised
Mixed run across Deep Dives (31 questions)