Welcome to Software Thug Tech

This blog is my preparation for a technical software architecture job, written down in public.

The premise is simple. Architecture interviews are less about knowing the right answer and more about showing how you think under ambiguity. Most of the questions have no single correct solution, and the people asking them know that. What they are listening for is whether you ask the right clarifying questions, name the trade-offs out loud, and can defend a choice without pretending the alternatives are stupid.

That is a skill you can practice. So each post here takes one subject or one likely interview question and works through it the way a strong candidate would.

What Every Post Covers

• The question, phrased the way an interviewer would actually ask it, plus the common variants
• What they are really asking, meaning the competency the question is designed to probe
• The gotchas, which is where candidates go wrong and why
• How to answer, with a structure you can reuse, diagrams where they help, and the trade-offs you should name explicitly
• Follow-up questions to expect, because the first answer is never the end of the conversation

What To Expect

Topics will range across system design, distributed systems, data modeling, cloud architecture, security, reliability, and the leadership and communication questions that come with a senior role. Some posts will be about a specific question (“How would you design a rate limiter?”). Others will be about a subject you need to hold in your head to answer many questions well (“What does consistency actually mean?”).

I write these with Claude as a co-author. The questions, the opinions, and the mistakes are mine; the drafting help is shared.

If you want my general-purpose writing on software, tools, and AI, that lives at softwarethug.com. This site stays focused on one thing.

Let’s get to work.