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A real interview question about cricket articles that started with a simple inverted-index answer and turned into a deep dive on retrieval-augmented generation, tool calling, MCP, and hash map internals. The question that looked like a trick was really testing how far I could think.

How I built a Kanban board that feels instant by pushing state into IndexedDB on the frontend and pairing it with a Linear-inspired sync engine on the backend. The architecture, the tradeoffs, and what I'd do differently.

A detailed walkthrough of a Java-focused Rakuten interview round covering core Java, OOP, collections, Spring Boot, Hibernate, concurrency, and tricky language questions — with complete answers and code.

A real SDE-3 system design round at HighLevel — designing a multi-tenant CRM backend. The questions asked, where the discussion went, and what the right answers look like.

A walkthrough of Stripe's programming round — from the take-home-style assessment to a live 60-minute problem-solving session built around a 3-part shipping-cost problem that scales from a simple min-sum into a full DP. With the full problem, my actual solutions, and the optimal ones.

A short writeup of Rippling's pipeline: a simple HackerRank assessment, then an AI-powered coding round where I built a corporate credit-card expense-policy engine end to end. The focus here is on how I ran the interview — nailing the entities and labels up front, talking through the design, and using AI to do most of the typing while I drove.

A low-level design round from a well-known crypto company: design a multi-asset crypto wallet with correct, concurrency-safe transaction handling. Full Java design — project structure, entities, DTOs, controllers, services, a double-entry ledger, transaction state machine, idempotency, and concurrency control.

A De Shaw round where I was handed a deliberately tricky Integer vs int snippet. Here's the snippet, the answer I gave, and the full theory of why Java's autoboxing and unboxing make each line behave the way it does — including the Integer cache landmine.

AGI Timelines: The Continual Learning Bottleneck and Why Agents Aren't Ready

A case study in agentic engineering: instead of guessing at a 700ms page load, I drove an AI coding agent like a senior pair — anchoring it with constraints, demanding proof before any change, and forcing production verification. Here are the exact prompts I used, the agentic workflow, and the real optimizations that shipped.

Learn how to design a parking lot management system from scratch using object-oriented principles and design patterns.

Learn how to design a scalable URL shortener service that can handle millions of requests per day with proper system architecture.

A 700ms local page load sent me down a rabbit hole — and the real lesson had nothing to do with the page. Why dev, sandbox, and UAT environments are structurally incomparable to production, how to actually benchmark and load-test on AWS/Azure, and what a senior engineer looks for before trusting a single latency number.

Learn how to design a scalable real-time chat system that can handle millions of concurrent users with WebSockets, message queuing, and distributed architecture.

Big outages are rarely about a system going down — they're about one part of the system lying while everything else looks green. Five public postmortems from Google, AWS, Atlassian, Cloudflare, and GitLab, and the concrete engineering lessons from each.