Interview study guide
Leading the work, not just doing it.
Code review, standards, Git, CI/CD, testing strategy, Agile and leading a team across time zones, written as checklists and answers you can use. Git behaviour is shown with commands that were run, and every pipeline passes actionlint.
- Chapters
- 11
- Topics
- 58
- Code samples
- 257
- Added beyond the doc
- 58
Learned
0 / 58
Study streak
0 days
This week
- 0 topics learned
- 0 highlights
- 0 of 7 days studied
Recent highlights See all →
Install Tech Lead Notes as an appOpens full screen from your home screen and works offline.
01The Lead Engineer RoleWhat a senior or lead engineer is actually responsible for, how to own a workstream end to end, a plan for the first 90 days on a new team or contract, what to keep building yourself and what to hand over, and how to balance delivery, quality and people when they pull in different directions.02Code ReviewWhat review is for, a checklist for reading a pull request, writing comments people can act on, keeping pull requests small and reviews fast across time zones, letting tools do the boring checks, and reviewing code an AI assistant wrote.03Engineering StandardsHow a lead sets standards a team actually follows: writing them down, recording architecture decisions as ADRs, a definition of done with automated quality gates, API and documentation standards, and enforcing all of it with tools (ESLint, Prettier, hooks, CI, CODEOWNERS, rulesets) instead of meetings. The tool configurations on this page were run with ESLint 10.13.0, Prettier 3.9.10, lint-staged 17.6.0 and Redocly CLI 2.71.2; workflows pass actionlint.04Git and Pull Request WorkflowsHow a team moves code from a laptop to production with Git: trunk-based development vs GitFlow, what merge, squash and rebase do to history, commit messages people can use, release branches and hotfixes, recovering from mistakes, and finding a regression with
git bisect. Every Git behaviour on this page comes from a script that ran real git (2.54.0) in a throwaway repository.05CI/CD PipelinesWhat continuous integration and delivery really mean, a complete GitHub Actions pipeline for a web UI and an API (matrix, caching, artefacts, service containers), quality gates and required checks, environments with approvals and deployment strategies, keeping pipelines fast and trusted, and the DORA metrics. Every workflow on this page passes actionlint 1.7.12, and every model ran on Node 26.06Testing StrategyWhat each kind of test catches and costs, the pyramid and the trophy and why they mostly agree, what coverage does and doesn't tell you, how to find and fix flaky tests, and how to get a legacy codebase under test. The test examples are real node:test suites that run on Node 26.07Agile and Scrum in PracticeWhat the Scrum Guide actually says (and doesn't), estimating and forecasting without fooling anyone, Kanban and flow, working with shifting priorities and missing documentation, and running Daily Scrums, refinement and retrospectives that change something.08Leading Distributed TeamsLeading engineers in India from Austin: the real overlap windows across US clock changes, handoffs, async specs and tickets, onboarding and mentoring, delegating without micromanaging, feedback across cultures, and one quality bar for every site.09Communication and StakeholdersDesign documents, status updates and escalations, working inside a client's engineering team, explaining trade-offs to people who don't write code, and running discussions that end in a decision.10Behavioural InterviewsHow behavioural answers are scored, the STAR structure and how long an answer should be, the questions a lead full stack role on a device platform will ask, prompts and a template for building your own stories in My notes, and what to ask the interviewer.11Review QuestionsRapid revision before an interview: short questions with answers you can say out loud in a minute, each linked to the topic that explains it in depth.Added marks topics that weren’t in my original doc. Tick Learned on a topic to track what you’ve revised.