Study plan

Three routes depending on how much time you have. All of them combine courses (understanding) with the question bank and the mock interviews (practice).

The rule that runs through all three: for every hour of reading, half an hour answering out loud and on a timer. Interviews don’t measure what you know — they measure what you manage to say in 60 seconds.

🏃 Sprint route — 10 days

For when the interview is already booked. About 3 hours a day.

Day	Study	Practice
1	Course 00 (distributed fundamentals), modules 1–3	Idempotency lab
2	Course 00, modules 4–6	Cascading-failure lab
3	Course 08 (system design), modules 1–2	2 timed design cases
4	Your language course (Java / TypeScript / Go), first half	Bank questions, summary answers
5	Your language course, second half + diagnostics lab	The [CASO] questions for your language
6	Course 04: your cloud + the Kubernetes module	Questions for that cloud
7	Course 06 (security) 1–2 · Course 07 (APIs) 1–2	Security and versioning questions
8	Course 08, modules 3 and 5	3 production incidents, out loud
9	Course 09 (interview technique), complete	Write your 6 STAR stories and record them
10	Review of summary answers	Full mock interview with the rubric

If you only had 3 days: course 00 (days 1–2) + course 08 modules 1, 2 and 5 + your STAR stories. That’s the 20% that gives 80%.

🧗 Full route — 8 weeks

To change league, not to pass an exam. About 8 hours a week.

Week	Course	Bank	Your own deliverable
1	00 · Fundamentals	Production incident cases	A service with real idempotency + outbox
2	Your language	Full language area	A memory leak reproduced and diagnosed with a profiler
3	07 · APIs and versioning	API versioning area	v1 and v2 coexisting + contract tests in CI
4	04 · Cloud and Kubernetes	Your cloud + Kubernetes	A deployment with zero 502s during rollout
5	06 · Security	Security area	Threat model + 3 vulnerabilities fixed
6	05 · Micro-frontends (if relevant) or review	Micro-frontends area	Shell + 2 remotes with independent deploys
7	08 · System design	The 10 design cases	5 designs written and timed
8	09 · Interview technique	Review of summary answers	3 mock interviews with another person

🎯 Routes by job profile

Profile	Recommended order	Where they’ll press hardest
Backend (Java)	00 → 01 → 07 → 04 → 08 → 06	JVM, transactions, Kafka, production cases
Backend (Node/TS)	00 → 02 → 07 → 04 → 08 → 06	Event loop, types at the boundary, shutdown, memory
Backend (Go) / platform	00 → 03 → 04 → 08 → 07 → 06	Goroutines and leaks, `context`, pprof, Kubernetes
Fullstack, frontend-heavy	00 → 05 → 02 → 07 → 08	Micro-frontends, contracts, performance
Staff / architect	00 → 08 → 07 → 06 → 04	Trade-offs, migrations, cost, organisation
SRE / DevOps	00 → 04 → 08 → 06 → your language	Incidents, observability, reliability, cost
QA / automation	00 → QA mock → 07 → 04 → 08	Test strategy, flakiness, quality in the process

📅 Recommended daily routine (90 minutes)

15 min · Out-loud review of 10 summary answers from previous days (spaced repetition)
45 min · A new course module
20 min · The module's lab or practice
10 min · Write down what you learned and what still feels weak

The first line is the highest-yield one and the one everyone skips: memory is built by retrieval, not by re-reading.

🔁 The 7 days before the interview

When	What
−7	Research the company: product, scale, stack, engineering blog. Adjust which areas you review
−5	Full design mock, recorded
−3	Your language mock + the [CASO] questions for your area
−2	STAR stories out loud, timed
−1	Only summary answers and your questions for them. Nothing new. Sleep
Day	20-minute review, water, and join the call 10 minutes early

Don’t study anything new the day before. New material displaces what’s consolidated and creates insecurity exactly when you need fluency.