Topic hub
Full stack
API design, persistence, auth, deployment, and how browser apps talk to servers — typical breadth for full-stack web interviews.
Interview breadth checklist
Questions labeled Full Stack on Company Q&A span backend-facing themes alongside UI work — rehearse how you connect each layer when you trace a request end to end.
APIs & contracts
- REST resource modeling, status codes, idempotency for
POST/PUT, pagination, and versioning. - GraphQL vs REST trade-offs: N+1, schema evolution, persisted queries, and when batching helps.
Persistence
- Transactions, isolation levels, indexes that match real queries, and migration discipline across environments.
- SQL vs document stores — normalization vs embedding; caches (TTL, stampede, invalidate-after-write).
Auth & browser boundaries
- Sessions vs JWT claims vs OAuth flows — cookie attributes (
HttpOnly,SameSite), rotation, CSRF posture for cookie APIs. - CORS preflight when browsers hit distinct origins — avoid casually weakening origins or wildcard credentials.
Runtime & delivery
- Env config per stage (secrets vs flags), container/host assumptions, graceful shutdown, structured logs & trace IDs across tiers.
- CI/CD gates — migrations ordering, smoke checks, blue/green or staged rollout vocabulary you can defend.
Product-shaped architecture
- When a modular monolith is enough vs extracting services — coupling markers such as schema ownership and deployment blast radius.
- Background jobs, outboxes or eventual consistency stories clients observe — pairing nicely with System Design cards elsewhere on the site.