Backend & Systems Learning Questions §

Docker §

• Demonstrate basic images
• Demonstrate hot reload of a webserver (bind mount)
• Demonstrate pulling in redis and communicating to it over a network through docker compose
  • Ask how docker interacts with the OS and provisions these resources (ex: linux networking namespace)
• What is the docker daemon (and alternatives ex: podman)

Docker + Webservers §

• Demonstrate pulling in nginx as a simple load balancer with docker scale
  • Understand L4 and L7 load balancing, geo distributed load balancing, WSGI, reverse proxy
• Demonstrate Django, Gunicorn
• Demonstrate Celery workers + some message broker
• Demonstrate traefik
• Async Webserver (fastapi)
• Demonstrate websocket streaming, HTTP streaming

Distributed Webservers §

• Demonstrate Kubernetes
  • Understand containerd, kubernetes networking model

Fullstack Modern Frontend §

• Demonstrate React SPA, Vercel + Next.JS

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Concepts Worth Learning at a Super High Level §

OS & Shell Fundamentals §

• History of OS + What is a kernel exactly
• What is a shell exactly (an interpreter, ex: bash, zsh, fish)
• What is a terminal emulator exactly (I/O GUI for the shell)
• What are the GNU core utilities (C programs)
• What is the pipe (just a buffer and two file descriptors)

Networking & Internet §

• Internet Stack / OSI Model
• DNS Resolution, Recursive Resolvers, Providers, Registry, etc.
• IPv4, IPv6
• TCP, HTTP Streaming, Websockets, UDP
• SSL, TLS

Browser & Web Platform §

• History of HTML / HTTP / Browser / DOM / XML / HTML5
• What is a browser? (C++ program with networking stack, renderer, JS interpreter)
• Browser Architecture (Web API, task queue micro/macro, history of JS API, etc.)
• PHP, V8 Engine, AJAX, DOM Parser, DOM API, React, VDOM
• Node, ES module vs Node package, bundlers (Webpack, Vite)
• React + NextJS, React SPA, Page Routers, Vercel
• Serverless, Edge Computing
• Server Components, use client, hydration
• Wasm

Language Implementation §

• Interpreted vs Compiled, JIT compilation
• PyPy, calling into C from Python (ex: jax)
• Scripting languages that work closely with compiled/embedded languages (lua in engines, redis lua, etc.)

Concurrency Models §

• How do various languages support concurrency?
  • Coroutine / green threads
  • Explicit thread control / POSIX thread
  • Default thread pool
  • Event loop

Authentication §

• Basic Auth / Bearer / JWT
• OAuth

Startups & Business §

• Pre-seed / accelerators
• Funding rounds
• Typical equity model / structure

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Python Deep Dive §

Language Implementation §

• How is the language implemented - objects, scope

Useful Tricks for Interviewing §

• dataclass + frozen, order
• Counter, defaultdict, sortedlist

Modules §

• asyncio, multiprocessing
• celery

Client-side HTTP §

• requests, aiohttp, tenacity

Package Management §

• venv, poetry, uv