The 7-minute Drill
Every day there is one new situation. Read it, answer 3 to 5 questions in your own words, and get a short report on what you did well and what to fix.
Today: Account reads are slow on a store built for fast writesNext Drill at 05:30 IST
What you get
20 incidents and 16 face-offs. Each one comes in 3 versions, with a different cause or different numbers, so you cannot just memorise the answer.
Incident
Checkout takes 9 seconds after lunch
Your shop’s checkout was fast all morning. Since 1 pm it takes about 9 seconds to load. Traffic is 3 times the morning, the 4 app servers are at 90% CPU, and the database CPU is at 20%.
Q1You have just been paged. What do you check first, and why?
Face-off
Cache it, or fix the query?
One slow query on your product page takes 600 ms, and it runs 800 times a second. One teammate wants to put a cache in front of it. Another wants to add an index and fix the query.
Q1Which would you do first, and what would you check before you decide?
Both are samples, written for this page. Today’s real Drill is different.
How a Drill goes
You get the facts: what broke, and the numbers. No theory first. Decide what you would look at first.
An interviewer asks 3 to 5 questions, one at a time. You type what you would check and do, and why.
It lists the points you covered and the ones you missed, with the reason each one matters. Then you can try the weak part again.
VerdictSolid
You covered
A stronger answer would have…
Fix itTry the weak part again.
The habit
Each dayNext Drill at 05:30 IST
A Pack drops to 2 a day once its interview credits are used up.
Want more than 7 minutes?
About 12 minutes. You read dashboards and logs, find the cause, and fix it.
See the incident investigationDo it with a friend
Everyone gets the same Drill on the same day, so you can compare notes. The message has the title, the date and the link, and nothing else.
Read today’s Drill and send itQuestions
An AI interviewer asks the questions and writes the report. Every quote in the report is your own words, checked word for word, so it cannot make one up. The points it looks for come from a list we wrote for each situation.
No. Drills never use interview credits. Your free Drill each day is separate from your mock interviews.
A Drill counts only after your first real answer. If you leave before that, it does not use up your Drill for the day.
The daily Drill does not come back until all the others have had their day. There are 20 incident situations and 16 face-offs, and each comes in 3 versions with a different cause or different numbers.
One real situation, a few questions, and a short report. Free once a day.