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Module 12 · Enterprise level (capstone)

Lesson 57 — Capstone project

Defense of the complete backend and a simulated postmortem — the final exam of the craft.

Published
In this lesson
  1. Exercise 1 — The defense's material
  2. Exercise 2 — The technical defense
  3. Exercise 3 — The simulated postmortem
  4. Exercise 4 — The business pitch
  5. Exercise 5 — The close
  6. Submit

The defense, the pitch and the drill. No solutions.md before submitting.

Exercise 1 — The defense's material

  1. The one-pager: the system map (55) with §2's 10 guarantees on ONE page (48: the reviewed doc). It is the main deliverable: paste it.
  2. The repo's inventory: the exam's checklist (tests green? 41's pipeline? ADRs indexed? 47's runbook? 56's map?): run every verification and note the real status.
  3. The 3 random guarantees: pick 3 rows of §2 with dice (or have someone else pick) and prepare them with demo: does the evidence exist? does it run in <5 min? If one fails: that IS this week's final work (the guarantee's gap is the exam's finding).

Exercise 2 — The technical defense

  1. The REQUEST's tour: write the 10-min script of the checkout end to end (32 with the real system): each leg with its lesson and its test. Rehearse it aloud with a timer.
  2. The FAILURE's tour: the 10-min script: the breaker (54), the UNKNOWN (32), 47's postmortem — "the system defended by what it does when it hurts". The script's test: does someone outside the course follow it?
  3. The 3 weapon questions: prepare "why not K8s? why not Kafka? why partial DDD?": each answer with its ADR, its trigger and its number. The exam: answer them aloud without reading.

Exercise 3 — The simulated postmortem

  1. Inject §4's 5 incidents into YOUR environment, one per day, solve them with chronology (47's format): (a) the 5 s latency; (b) the dead poller; (c) the deploy's N+1; (d) the full Redis; (e) the reported duplicated charge. Paste the 5 chronologies.
  2. Incident (e) in depth: the customer's "I was charged twice": the investigation with the ledger (08) and the intent (14): charged twice or the front's retry? The verdict with evidence and the answer to the customer (51: the translation).
  3. The timing: your best chronology vs your worst: what were you missing in the worst one (the alert? the runbook? the tool?)? The fix with issue/owner/date.

Exercise 4 — The business pitch

  1. The 10-min pitch (51): the money map + the jargon-free translation + the 3 decisions that bought the most value (the outbox? the turnstile? the modular monolith?). Rehearse it with the aunt test: does the language survive?
  2. The business's 3 questions: prepare "how much does this cost per month? (42)", "what if it goes down? (46/47)", "how much does it scale? (55)": each answer with its number and no technobabble.
  3. The investor/CTO page: the system's 5-line version (what it sells, what it guarantees, what it costs, how much it scales, what is decided?): the business's one-pager.

Exercise 5 — The close

  1. The letter to future-you: the 3 things you would do DIFFERENTLY if you started TicketFlow today (with what you know) — the honest 1-page document (48).
  2. The next project's plan: module 12's 3 lessons applied FROM day 1 (domain, boundaries, ADRs): write YOUR next project's startup order (49: phases with estimate).
  3. The course's close: the personal checklist of "I am a senior backend when..." (10 course items: the test net, the ADR, the game day, the pitch...). The craft's self-definition that the site's index accompanies.

Submit

Paste the one-pager with the 10 guarantees, the defense's scripts, the drill's 5 chronologies and the pitch. The course ends: the craft continues.

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