Entrance Assessment

A few ground rules, plainly put:

Use any tools you normally would — search, AI, documentation. That's how real work happens. The one condition: you must understand what you hand in. I'll ask you to explain your reasoning.
Some of this you won't have seen before. That's intentional. Reason it through — a thoughtful "here's how I'd figure it out" is worth more than a memorised answer.
Work in one sitting if you can. Your progress saves on its own, so you can close the tab and return without losing a thing.
No trick questions. Be honest, take your time, and show me your thinking.

Your name A link to something you've built and put online

I

Something you've shipped

Answer from what you already know — no need to look these up.

You've put a site online before. Walk me through the actual steps you took to get it live — as if you were showing someone who'd never done it. What is an environment variable, and why wouldn't you just write a secret value — say, an API key — directly into your code? You want to point a domain you own (say yourname.com) at a site you've deployed. What would you need to change, and roughly where? Rough is fine.

II

At the command line

You don't need to have run these. Tell me what each one does, in plain English.

1)  ls -la
2)  cd /var/www && tail -n 50 error.log
3)  chmod 600 id_rsa
4)  ssh deploy@203.0.113.10

What does each line do? (number them) Line 3 makes a private key file readable only by its owner. Why would that matter for a key like this? (A reasoned guess is fine.)

III

A small script

Each log line begins with a level — ERROR, WARN, or INFO. Write tallyLevels(lines) so it takes a list of log strings and returns a count of each level, e.g. {ERROR:2, INFO:1}. Use JavaScript — it runs right here.

function tallyLevels(lines){
  // lines = ["ERROR disk full", "INFO started", "ERROR timeout"]
  // return { ERROR: 2, INFO: 1 }

}

—

IV

Learning something on the spot

This part uses git. If you've never used it, that's completely fine — here's the whole idea in four lines. Read it, then reason through the questions below. I care how you pick it up, not whether you already knew it.

# git, in 30 seconds
commit  →  a saved snapshot of your code, with a note on what changed
push    →  send your commits up to the shared copy everyone works from
branch  →  a separate line of work, so experiments don't touch the real thing
main    →  the primary branch — usually what goes live to real users

Now here's a file that runs automatically whenever code is pushed. You won't have seen this syntax — read it, use the docs if you like, and work it out.

stages:
  - test
  - deploy

run_tests:
  stage: test
  script:
    - npm install
    - npm test

deploy_site:
  stage: deploy
  script:
    - npm run build
    - ./deploy.sh
  only:
    - main

In plain English, what does this do from start to finish? Why might only: main sit on the deploy step but not the test step? What does that prevent? This was probably new to you. How did you go about making sense of it — what did you look up, and what finally clicked?

V

When it breaks

An ordinary afternoon. Someone messages: "your site won't load." You check — they're right. You don't yet know why.

Walk me through your first ten minutes, in order. What do you look at — before you change anything? You find that the last deploy, half an hour ago, broke it. What do you do — and what do you do first?

VI

A second pair of eyes

A teammate is about to push the setup below to a public repository and take it live. Look it over the way someone trying to break in would.

# committed to the repo — config.js
const config = {
  dbPassword: "admin123",
  apiKey: "sk_live_9f8a7b6c5d",
  adminEmail: "boss@company.com"
};

# on the server:
#  - SSH login allowed with a password (root enabled)
#  - firewall: every port open
#  - the .env secrets file committed into git — the shared code everyone pulls — "so the team has it"

What would you flag, and why is each one a problem? Of everything here, which worries you most — and if someone found it, what could they actually do?

VII

A few last questions

It's late, and you're the only one online. You have access to the live system. You spot a setting that looks wrong — but changing it might take the site down. What do you do? Which part of this gave you the most trouble? Walk me through what you actually did when you got stuck. Roughly how long did this take, and did you do it in one sitting? On a scale of 1–5, how confident are you that you could get very good at this kind of work over the next three months?

Anything you'd like me to know — about you, your last role, or why this one interests you?

✦

Finish

When you're ready, send your answers to me on WhatsApp — one tap.

Prefer to send it yourself? Two backups:

Reviewer code (only if I ask you for it)