The Gap Was Retrieval

Weird week. Best interview I've given, worst fumble I've had, and both were the same hour.

The interviewCopied!

Money Forward, Sunday the 17th. My first proper technical interview.

The projects part went genuinely well. They picked Flock and grilled it for a while, and I could answer everything, because I actually built the thing. That part felt great.

Then the system design question. And here's the funny part: it was literally made of things I have already shipped. The timed hold in the question is the TTL keys in my presence system. The don't-oversell-the-inventory part is a race condition I found in my own billing code and fixed months ago.

I fumbled it. Under pressure I just could not get to any of it.

The DSA round I also fumbled a bit. But the system design one is the one that actually bothered me, because I wasn't missing knowledge. I had shipped the answer. I just couldn't pull it out of my head with someone watching.

So the next morning I built the fix. A lookup table that maps system design concepts to my own projects, so every concept has a thing I built attached to it. Worked answers written out in full. Drills that I score myself on. 26 real company case studies in interviewer-prompt format. A behavioral bank of 10 STAR stories.

The gap was never knowledge. It was retrieval under pressure. So I built the retrieval.

Round 2 was Wednesday, techno-managerial. That one I cooked. The manager said I'd fit their Platform and SecOps team, and the only thing left was HR.

That was four days ago. Haven't heard anything since. So, probably ghosted. Still the furthest I've gotten this whole season, and I'd rather have gotten close and learned what breaks than never have been in the room.

GSoC is doneCopied!

Final submission went in on the 19th. Blogs written, status reports filed, the form submitted, all the messages sent.

Also wrote a proper wrap-up post about it: GSoC 2026: The Parts That Don't Go in the Report. Three widgets merged into Kdenlive, and everything around them. Being wrong twice about the same bug. Building a widget twice because I didn't want to ask a question. The weeks I went quiet because internship applications ate my head. It's the honest version, not the report version.

What I worked onCopied!

• breakscale (private, not ready to be released yet): a system design simulator. You build a system on a canvas, load it until it breaks, and watch why it broke. Discrete event engine underneath, live metrics on every node, about 30 component kinds now, from load balancers and sharded stores to autoscalers, circuit breakers, bulkheads and load shedders. Preset scenarios and some real company architectures to poke at.

The whole point is you can watch a single component die in real time instead of reading about it.

Started it Sunday while studying system design and did not stop. This is very obviously a direct product of fumbling that interview question.

• games page on this site: what I've played, what I'm playing, and the backlog I keep pretending I'll finish. Cover art comes from IGDB so console exclusives actually get proper box art. Search shared with the places page.

• fun mode: a toggle that adds colour to the prose across blog and weekly posts. Purely so reading the site is more fun. No other justification.

• Added a visitor counter to my GitHub profile after seeing it on veelesec's. It uses little anime characters for the digits.

The OAsCopied!

Microsoft on Monday. Two questions, 75 minutes, finished both in under 20. Honestly expected way worse after reading all the horror stories about it.

Then Saturday I found out I wasn't shortlisted. CGPA. Nothing to do about it at this point, and nothing stopping me from getting an intern at a startup instead.

Sat through Visa's pre-placement talk too. They said they care more about curiosity and problem solving and understanding the domain than about any specific technology, which I appreciated, even if the stack list was Java, Spring Boot, Angular, Flutter and MAUI. Their OA was scheduled for after this week, along with an Accenture application. Both of those went sideways in ways I'll get into next week.

Quizzes this week too: DAA, DBMS, CoA. Cooked those.

What I found interestingCopied!

• Tech-OA-Interview-Questions : a daily updated list of company OAs and interview problems. Extremely relevant to my current life.
• sshdesk : a full interactive remote desktop delivered entirely through SSH and rendered in your terminal. Cursed and wonderful.
• noicess : shiv's site for making nice looking screenshots, used it this week. (Add a ctrl+z, I pressed it about five times out of muscle memory.)

RandomCopied!

Warmed up my fingers before the Microsoft OA and hit 190 WPM at 100% accuracy. The OA was speed and accuracy, so this felt relevant at the time.

Then I went and looked at monkeytype's issues to find something to fix, which is a very normal way to prepare for a test.

Someone in my journal server found out we're both grinding toward the same dream car. Mine's a 911 Carrera GTS in rubystar. They asked what I think about the Taycan. No electrics.

Still applying to off-campus stuff. If you landed an off-campus SWE internship and have any actual advice on what got you in, cold emails or referrals or portals or Twitter, I'd genuinely like to hear it.