Session setup#
Copy this note for each interview exercise. Replace the placeholders, retain the first-pass reasoning, and add corrections in the review instead of rewriting history.
Date:
Prompt:
Interview length:
Expected level:
Interviewer guidance:
Working design#
Record the design in the order it emerged:
- Functional requirements and exclusions
- Quality targets and scale assumptions
- Capacity estimates
- APIs and data model
- High-level request, write, read, and asynchronous paths
- One detailed subsystem
- Failure, overload, recovery, security, and observability
- Decisions deferred because of time
Keep uncertain assumptions visible. A corrected estimate should sit beside the original estimate with a short explanation of what changed.
Review#
After the attempt, capture:
- What was clear and defensible
- Where the design depended on an unstated assumption
- Which component lacked a concrete responsibility
- Which failure or bottleneck was missed
- What the interviewer redirected
- One concept to study and one design to practice next
Summary#
Preserve the attempted design, append the critique, and finish with one concrete next practice target.