Turn a worked lesson into an independent interview practice session

Practice drawing the architecture · Motion gallery

Understand the concept. Implement the mechanism. Explain the tradeoff under time pressure. Coding, full-stack implementation, architecture and AWS exercises assess the same curriculum from different angles.

What the interviewer is asking you to demonstrate

“A user retries a save after a timeout. Show me the input, the promised state change, and what the retry may safely repeat. Now suppose the database stored the first save, but the response never reached the caller.”

The opening problem is the teaching anchor. Clarify success and failure, trace a tiny example, draw or implement a baseline, then change the design only when an invariant or measured cost requires it. A useful answer makes its assumptions testable. The individual coding problems and project pages supply those examples and progressive follow-ups; the assessment packs hold back new constraints until after your attempt.

Choose the concept, then the depth

Follow the curriculum for prerequisites. Use assessment depth to judge the same problem under harder constraints, and the assessment packs for independent sessions. Coding, full-stack, architecture and operational exercises all refer to the same subject pages.

Move from the reference to your own attempt

Begin with the question before expanding the solution. Predict the visual, implement from memory, test an adversarial input, then answer one follow-up that changes the constraints. Copying a solution into your editor is the start of study, not its completion.

AI use: study with it freely; mock once with it and once without it. In a real interview follow the supplied rules. If AI is allowed, explain the generated code, catch failures, and retain your own architectural judgment.

Run the examples

From the repository root:

python -m unittest discover -s curriculum/01-code/02-data-structures-algorithms -p 'test_*.py' -v
node --experimental-strip-types --test curriculum/01-code/02-data-structures-algorithms/typescript.test.ts
python -m unittest discover -s curriculum/03-production/03-infrastructure/aws/labs/job-pipeline -p 'test_*.py' -v
python scripts/check_learning.py

Python examples use the standard library. TypeScript examples use erasable type annotations and run with a Node version supporting type stripping (validated with Node 24). AWS deployment is a separate, explicit learner step; local examples do not require an AWS account.