# Software engineering practice briefs

> 305 authored practice prompts with expected evidence, hints, concept explanations and primary sources.

Canonical: https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/

305 authored prompts with expected evidence, hints and concept context.

- [Build a search tokenizer](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-tokenizer)
- [Build an inverted index](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-inverted-index)
- [Calculate a TF-IDF score by hand](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/calculate-tfidf)
- [Calculate a BM25 score by hand](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/calculate-bm25-score)
- [Implement a BM25 ranker](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/implement-bm25-ranker)
- [Compute precision and recall by hand](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/compute-precision-recall)
- [Build a search eval harness](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-search-eval-harness)
- [Implement reciprocal rank fusion](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/implement-rrf)
- [Embed a corpus and search it](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/embed-and-search)
- [Implement similarity metrics](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/implement-similarity-metrics)
- [Top-k with a bounded heap](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/implement-topk-heap)
- [Build a brute-force vector index](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-brute-force-index)
- [Explain HNSW search on paper](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/explain-hnsw-layers)
- [Add metadata filtering to vector search](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/implement-metadata-filter)
- [Build a minimal RAG pipeline](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-rag-pipeline)
- [Build a structure-aware chunker](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-chunker)
- [Schema-constrained extraction](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/structured-extraction)
- [Build a tool-calling loop](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-tool-loop)
- [Build an LLM eval](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-llm-eval)
- [Implement a token-bucket rate limiter](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/implement-token-bucket)
- [Implement idempotency keys](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/implement-idempotency-key)
- [Implement backoff with jitter](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/implement-backoff-jitter)
- [Build a memtable + SSTable flush](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-memtable-sstable)
- [Build a write-ahead log](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-wal)
- [Two Sum with a hash map](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/two-sum-hashmap)
- [Valid palindrome with two pointers](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/valid-palindrome-two-pointers)
- [Longest substring without repeats](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/longest-substring-sliding-window)
- [Search in a rotated sorted array](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/search-rotated-array)
- [Binary tree level-order traversal](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/level-order-traversal)
- [Number of islands](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/number-of-islands)
- [House robber (1D DP)](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/house-robber-dp)
- [Kth largest element with a heap](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/kth-largest-heap)
- [Design a parking lot](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-parking-lot)
- [Design a vending machine](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-vending-machine)
- [Pluggable pricing strategies](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-pricing-strategies)
- [In-process pub/sub bus](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-pub-sub-bus)
- [Notification factory](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-notification-factory)
- [Coffee-shop order decorator](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-coffee-decorator)
- [Concurrent bank transfers](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-bank-account-locking)
- [Undo / redo stack](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-undo-redo)
- [Hotel booking system](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-hotel-booking)
- [L7 load balancer](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-load-balancer)
- [Distributed rate limiter](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-rate-limiter)
- [Realtime chat system](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-chat-system)
- [News feed (Twitter-style)](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-news-feed)
- [Video streaming (Netflix-style)](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-video-streaming)
- [Ride-sharing dispatch](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-ride-sharing)
- [Make three replicas converge](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-g-counter-merge)
- [Collaborative doc editor](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-collaborative-editor)
- [Search platform end-to-end](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-search-platform)
- [Production RAG pipeline](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-rag-system)
- [Consistent-hash key router](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-consistent-hashing)
- [Leader election walkthrough](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-leader-election)
- [Realtime game server](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-online-game-server)
- [STAR: leadership story](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-leadership)
- [STAR: peer conflict](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-conflict)
- [STAR: tough decision](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-tough-decision)
- [STAR: cross-team collab](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-cross-team)
- [STAR: a real failure](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-failure)
- [STAR: explaining to a non-expert](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-communication)
- [STAR: ruthless prioritization](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-prioritization)
- [STAR: an unconventional idea](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-innovation)
- [STAR: acting on customer feedback](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-customer-feedback)
- [STAR: end-to-end ownership](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/star-ownership)
- [Draft a product positioning statement](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/draft-positioning-statement)
- [Critique a real landing page](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/critique-landing-page)
- [On-page SEO audit](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/audit-seo-onpage)
- [Define a north-star metric](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/define-north-star-metric)
- [Compute a dot product and angle](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/compute-dot-product)
- [Multiply 2×2 matrices by hand](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/multiply-2x2-matrix)
- [Interpret an eigenvalue](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/interpret-eigenvalue)
- [Apply Bayes' rule](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/conditional-probability-bayes)
- [Expectation and variance of a discrete RV](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/compute-expectation-variance)
- [Summarize a small dataset](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/summarize-dataset-stats)
- [Construct a 95% confidence interval](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/construct-confidence-interval)
- [Interpret a p-value correctly](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/interpret-p-value)
- [Fit a simple linear regression](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/fit-simple-regression)
- [Compute a 2D gradient](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/compute-gradient-2d)
- [Independence and inclusion-exclusion](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/independence-inclusion-exclusion)
- [Normal tail probability](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/normal-tail-probability)
- [Correlation pitfalls](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/correlation-pitfalls)
- [Type I vs Type II errors](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/type-errors-power)
- [Match distribution to scenario](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/match-distribution-scenario)
- [CLT and required sample size](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/clt-sample-size)
- [Standard error vs standard deviation](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/standard-error-mean)
- [Design an A/B test with power](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-ab-test-power)
- [Interpret a sample ratio mismatch](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/interpret-srm-alert)
- [Beta-Binomial posterior update](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/beta-binomial-posterior)
- [MLE for Bernoulli trials](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/mle-bernoulli-derivation)
- [Compute cross-entropy in bits](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/compute-cross-entropy-bits)
- [Compute covariance and correlation matrix](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/compute-covariance-matrix)
- [Diagnose overfit with a train/holdout split](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/diagnose-overfit-split)
- [Identify rank and column space](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/identify-rank-subspace)
- [PCA variance explained](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/pca-variance-explained)
- [Log returns and annualized volatility](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/compute-log-returns-vol)
- [Interpret an ACF plot](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/interpret-autocorrelation-plot)
- [Simulate a two-state Markov chain](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/simulate-markov-chain)
- [Sharpe ratio and max drawdown](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/compute-sharpe-drawdown)
- [Design an honest momentum backtest](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-honest-backtest)
- [Dot product and matmul shapes](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-dot-matmul-shapes)
- [One SGD step on a quadratic](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-sgd-step-quadratic)
- [Chain rule on a tiny graph](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-chain-rule-gate)
- [Softmax and cross-entropy loss](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-softmax-cross-entropy)
- [AdamW vs L2-on-gradient](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-adamw-weight-decay)
- [One BPE merge step](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-bpe-merge-step)
- [Perplexity from average NLL](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-perplexity-from-nll)
- [Temperature scaling logits](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-temperature-sampling)
- [Sinusoidal position encoding](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-sinusoidal-position)
- [Scaled dot-product attention weights](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-scaled-dot-attention)
- [Split embedding across heads](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-multi-head-split)
- [Pre-LayerNorm residual block](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-pre-norm-residual)
- [Overfit a single batch sanity check](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-overfit-sanity-check)
- [Checkpoint must include optimizer state](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-checkpoint-resume)
- [GRPO group-relative advantage](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-grpo-group-advantage)
- [LoRA parameter count](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-lora-param-count)
- [Estimate training token budget](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-token-budget-estimate)
- [WASM linear memory growth](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-wasm-linear-memory)
- [WebGPU buffer upload size](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-webgpu-buffer-alignment)
- [Perplexity vs classification accuracy](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ml-eval-perplexity-vs-acc)
- [Valid parentheses with a stack](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/valid-parentheses-stack)
- [Reverse a linked list in place](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/reverse-linked-list)
- [Trie prefix membership](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/trie-prefix-search)
- [Generate all subsets](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/subsets-backtracking)
- [Dijkstra shortest path](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/dijkstra-shortest-path)
- [Union-find component count](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/union-find-connected-components)
- [Minimum path sum in a grid](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/grid-min-path-dp)
- [Activity selection greedy](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/activity-selection-greedy)
- [Merge overlapping intervals](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/merge-intervals)
- [GCD and modulo arithmetic](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/gcd-modular)
- [Find the single number (XOR)](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/single-number-xor)
- [Cross-encoder rerank top-k](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/cross-encoder-rerank)
- [Spell-correct a search query](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/spell-correct-query)
- [Browse vs search metrics](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/browse-vs-search-metrics)
- [IVF nprobe vs recall](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ivf-nprobe-recall)
- [PQ codebook footprint](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/pq-codebook-size)
- [Read a recall–latency curve](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/read-recall-latency-curve)
- [Pack chunks into context budget](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/pack-context-budget)
- [Cap agent tool loop](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/agent-step-limit)
- [Route by cost and difficulty](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/route-by-query-cost)
- [Diff two prompt versions](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/prompt-version-diff)
- [Idempotent POST retry](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/http-idempotent-retry)
- [Hash and prefix API keys](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/hash-api-key)
- [Verify webhook HMAC](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/webhook-signature-verify)
- [At-least-once job delivery](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/job-at-least-once)
- [Cache stampede](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/cache-stampede)
- [Queue backpressure](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/queue-backpressure)
- [SLO error budget](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/slo-error-budget)
- [Design cursor pagination](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/design-paginated-api)
- [JWT revocation tradeoff](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/jwt-vs-session-revoke)
- [Idempotent charge](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/payment-idempotency)
- [B-tree page split](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/b-tree-split)
- [LSM compaction levels](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lsm-compaction-levels)
- [Object key layout](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/object-key-layout)
- [Columnar vs row store](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/columnar-vs-row)
- [Secondary index write cost](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/secondary-index-write)
- [Storage vs retrieval API](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/storage-vs-retrieval)
- [Pick a shard key](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/shard-key-choice)
- [Read-your-writes under lag](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/replication-lag-read)
- [CAP under partition](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/cap-partition-choice)
- [Condition number and learning rate](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/hessian-learning-rate)
- [Two Sum](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-two-sum)
- [Valid Palindrome](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-valid-palindrome)
- [Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock)
- [Contains Duplicate](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-contains-duplicate)
- [Maximum Subarray](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-maximum-subarray)
- [3Sum](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-3sum)
- [Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-longest-substring-without-repeating-characters)
- [Valid Parentheses](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-valid-parentheses)
- [Merge Two Sorted Lists](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-merge-two-sorted-lists)
- [Binary Search](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-binary-search)
- [Number of Islands](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-number-of-islands)
- [Climbing Stairs](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-climbing-stairs)
- [Coin Change](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-coin-change)
- [House Robber](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-house-robber)
- [Product of Array Except Self](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-product-of-array-except-self)
- [Group Anagrams](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-group-anagrams)
- [Top K Frequent Elements](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-top-k-frequent-elements)
- [Invert Binary Tree](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-invert-binary-tree)
- [Maximum Depth of Binary Tree](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-maximum-depth-of-binary-tree)
- [Kth Largest Element in an Array](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-kth-largest-element-in-an-array)
- [Word Search](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-word-search)
- [Permutations](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-permutations)
- [Jump Game](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-jump-game)
- [Merge Intervals](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-merge-intervals)
- [Single Number](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-single-number)
- [Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-lowest-common-ancestor-of-a-binary-search-tree)
- [Serialize and Deserialize Binary Tree](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-serialize-and-deserialize-binary-tree)
- [Course Schedule](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-course-schedule)
- [Rotting Oranges](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-rotting-oranges)
- [Task Scheduler](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-task-scheduler)
- [Subtree of Another Tree](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-subtree-of-another-tree)
- [Daily Temperatures](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-daily-temperatures)
- [Car Fleet](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-car-fleet)
- [Non-overlapping Intervals](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-non-overlapping-intervals)
- [Sum of Two Integers](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-sum-of-two-integers)
- [Reverse Bits](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lc-reverse-bits)
- [Design exercise: Operating System Mechanics](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-operating-system-mechanics)
- [Design exercise: Network Protocol Engineering](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-network-protocol-engineering)
- [Design exercise: Compute, Memory & Storage Hierarchy](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-compute-memory-storage-hierarchy)
- [Design exercise: Runtime & Performance Engineering](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-runtime-performance-engineering)
- [Design exercise: Security & Isolation Boundaries](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-security-isolation-boundaries)
- [Design exercise: Cloud Infrastructure](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-cloud-infrastructure)
- [Design exercise: Containers & Kubernetes](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-containers-kubernetes)
- [Design exercise: CI/CD & Developer Environments](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-cicd-developer-environments)
- [Design exercise: Scheduling & Orchestration](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-platform-scheduling-orchestration)
- [Design exercise: Reliability & Fault Tolerance](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-reliability-fault-tolerance)
- [Design exercise: Observability & OpenTelemetry](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-opentelemetry-observability)
- [Design exercise: Sandboxes & Execution Environments](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-sandbox-execution-environments)
- [Design exercise: Infrastructure Automation](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-infrastructure-automation)
- [Design exercise: Event Streaming & Kafka](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-event-streaming-kafka)
- [Design exercise: Distributed Workflows & Temporal](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-distributed-workflows-temporal)
- [Design exercise: Distributed Failure Recovery](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-distributed-failure-recovery)
- [Design exercise: Transaction Processing](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-transaction-processing)
- [Design exercise: Query Execution & Optimization](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-query-execution-optimization)
- [Design exercise: Data Warehouses & Lakehouses](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-warehouses-lakehouses)
- [Design exercise: Model Pre-training](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-ml-pretraining)
- [Design exercise: Model Quantization](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-model-quantization)
- [Design exercise: Open-Weight Models](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-open-weight-models)
- [Design exercise: vLLM & Inference Engines](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-inference-engines)
- [Design exercise: Continuous Batching](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-continuous-batching)
- [Design exercise: KV Caching & PagedAttention](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-kv-cache-paged-attention)
- [Design exercise: FlashAttention & Attention Kernels](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-flashattention-kernels)
- [Design exercise: Speculative Decoding](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-speculative-decoding)
- [Design exercise: GPU Utilization](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-gpu-utilization)
- [Design exercise: Inference Cost & Latency Optimization](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-inference-cost-latency)
- [Design exercise: Local & On-device Inference](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-local-on-device-inference)
- [Design exercise: Inference Hardware](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-inference-hardware)
- [Design exercise: Agent Memory & Context Management](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-agent-memory-context)
- [Design exercise: MCP & Integrations](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-mcp-integrations)
- [Design exercise: Multi-agent Coordination](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-multi-agent-coordination)
- [Design exercise: Durable Agent Execution](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-durable-agent-execution)
- [Design exercise: Agent Permissions & Sandboxing](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-agent-permissions-sandboxing)
- [Design exercise: Browser & Computer-use Agents](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-browser-computer-use-agents)
- [Design exercise: Agent Communication & Interfaces](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-agent-communication-interfaces)
- [Design exercise: Long-running & Scheduled Agents](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-long-running-scheduled-agents)
- [Design exercise: Coding-agent Benchmarks](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-coding-agent-benchmarks)
- [Design exercise: Tool-use Evaluations](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-tool-use-evaluations)
- [Design exercise: AI Regression Testing](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-ai-regression-testing)
- [Design exercise: Hallucination & Failure Detection](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-hallucination-failure-detection)
- [Design exercise: Agent Observability](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-agent-observability)
- [Design exercise: Tracing & Replay](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-tracing-replay)
- [Design exercise: Evidence-backed Verification](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-evidence-backed-verification)
- [Design exercise: Human Review Systems](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-human-review-systems)
- [Design exercise: Quality, Cost & Latency Measurement](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-quality-cost-latency-measurement)
- [Design exercise: Code Review Systems](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-code-review-systems)
- [Design exercise: Static & Dynamic Analysis](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-static-dynamic-analysis)
- [Design exercise: Testing Infrastructure](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-testing-infrastructure)
- [Design exercise: Codebase Graphs](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-codebase-graphs)
- [Design exercise: Dependency & Blast-radius Analysis](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-dependency-blast-radius)
- [Design exercise: IDE & CLI Tooling](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-ide-cli-tooling)
- [Design exercise: Coding Agent Systems](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-coding-agent-systems)
- [Design exercise: Repository Intelligence](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-repository-intelligence)
- [Design exercise: Software Supply-chain Health](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-software-supply-chain-health)
- [Design exercise: Automated Debugging & Remediation](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-automated-debugging-remediation)
- [Design exercise: Web & Mobile Engineering](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-web-mobile-engineering)
- [Design exercise: UX & Interface Design](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-ux-interface-design)
- [Design exercise: Real-time Application Engineering](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-real-time-application-engineering)
- [Design exercise: 2D/3D Interactive Systems](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-interactive-2d-3d-systems)
- [Design exercise: Multimodal Models](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-multimodal-models)
- [Design exercise: Vision Models](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-vision-models)
- [Design exercise: Pose & Motion Tracking](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-pose-motion-tracking)
- [Design exercise: Voice & Audio Systems](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-voice-audio-systems)
- [Design exercise: Image & Video Generation](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-image-video-generation)
- [Design exercise: Robotics Systems](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-robotics-systems)
- [Design exercise: Spatial Interfaces](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-spatial-interfaces)
- [Design exercise: Human-Computer Interaction](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-human-computer-interaction)
- [Amortised growth of a dynamic array](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/analyse-amortised-growth)
- [Stable sort by one key](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/stable-sort-by-key)
- [Size a write-heavy service](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/size-a-write-heavy-service)
- [Split functional from non-functional](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/classify-requirements)
- [Answer range-sum queries in O(1)](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/range-sum-queries)
- [Next greater element](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/next-greater-element)
- [Rabin-Karp substring search](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/rolling-hash-search)
- [Total weight of a minimum spanning tree](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/kruskal-mst-weight)
- [Detect write skew under snapshot isolation](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/detect-write-skew)
- [Pick the join the planner should pick](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/pick-a-join-strategy)
- [Exponential backoff with full jitter](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/backoff-with-jitter)
- [Parameterise instead of escaping](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/parameterise-a-query)
- [Latency against utilisation](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/utilisation-latency-curve)
- [Distances concentrate as dimensions grow](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/distance-concentration)
- [Skip documents that cannot reach the top k](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/wand-threshold-skip)
- [Token bucket rate limiter](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/token-bucket-limiter)
- [Pack and unpack a Snowflake id](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/snowflake-id-layout)
- [Solve a divide-and-conquer recurrence](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/recurrence-depth)
- [k-th smallest by quickselect](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/kth-smallest-quickselect)
- [Spot the update anomaly](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/find-the-anomaly)
- [Why LRU-K survives a scan](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/lru-k-eviction)
- [Cursor pagination that survives inserts](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/keyset-pagination)
- [Count with inclusion-exclusion](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/count-with-inclusion-exclusion)
- [Log-sum-exp without overflow](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/logsumexp-stable)
- [NDCG@k](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ndcg-at-k)
- [Debias clicks by inverse propensity](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/ipw-debias-clicks)
- [Scalar quantise and rescore](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/scalar-quantize-roundtrip)
- [Cost a disk-resident search by I/O](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/count-random-reads)
- [Tombstones erode recall](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/tombstone-recall-drift)
- [Decide the edge cache key](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/cache-key-and-ttl)
- [Encode a binary compatibility fixture](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-data-representation)
- [Trace a program into process memory](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/practice-program-memory-model)
- [Build a scoped repository instruction map](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-rules-first-workspace)
- [Define an agent-readable environment contract](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/make-agent-readable-workspace)
- [Create a durable agent handoff](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-multi-session-continuity)
- [Enforce runtime scope and escalation](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/add-feedback-and-scope-control)
- [Separate maker claims from checker evidence](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/separate-maker-and-checker)
- [Implement a bounded agent run lifecycle](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/build-complete-harness-lifecycle)
- [Evaluate and ablate an agent harness](https://learn.significanthobbies.com/curriculum/drills/evaluate-automated-agent-loop)