Interview practice

Interview practice is a secondary pressure test for engineering fluency developed through the course. Do not memorize answers before attempting the relevant lesson, lab, and retrieval challenge.

Practice loop

1. Select one weak or due-for-review concept from the learning map.
2. Answer one question aloud before consulting notes.
3. Escalate through Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create only while evidence holds.
4. Complete a coding, debugging, or design task without a recipe.
5. Explain concept → mechanism → concrete example → tradeoff → verification.
6. Record the misconception, evidence, and next spaced review.

Materials

• Question bank — one-question-at-a-time Bloom escalation.
• Debugging drills — reproduce, discriminate, identify root cause, regress.
• System design — constraints, architecture, runtime, and operations.
• Mock interview — timed communication and decision pressure.

Decision framework

For every choice state:

1. context and constraint;
2. owner, lifetime, and trust boundary;
3. chosen approach and mechanism;
4. viable rejected alternative;
5. operational failure mode;
6. evidence that would reverse the decision.

Avoid absolutes such as “always use OnPush,” “never subscribe,” or “signals replace RxJS.” Strong answers identify where a recommendation stops being correct.

Error correction

When an answer fails, the interviewer should not immediately supply the correct response. Ask what the learner believed, why it seemed reasonable, where evidence diverges, and what corrected model predicts a modified scenario. Repeat that modified scenario later before increasing mastery.