Labs / Track
Become a Technical Analyst
Three missions in order: analyze an API before integration, validate an event flow across Kafka and logs, then investigate a production incident to root cause. One system, rising difficulty.
3 missions, about 210 minutes
What you can do at the end
You can take a contract, an event backbone, or an incident ticket, and produce the artifact a delivery team acts on: a gap register, a diagnosis with a replay plan, an incident report with a root cause chain.
The track follows one system, Northline Pay, through the three moments where a technical analyst earns the seat: before the build, when a flow breaks, and when money goes wrong in production. Each mission reuses what you learned about the system in the previous one. The idempotency gap you flag in Mission 01 is the trigger of the incident in Mission 03. The dead letter queue replay you plan in Mission 02 is the condition that makes Mission 03 happen. That is not a coincidence: it is how real platforms fail.
Do them in order, with the solution closed until your write-up is done. Score yourself honestly. The findings you did not have are the ones this track exists for.
The missions, in order
- Mission 01 Structured 60 min 4 steps
Analyze a payment API
A hands-on lab for technical analysts: read a real OpenAPI contract against requirements, sample responses, and business rules, and find the gaps before a developer writes integration code.
API analysisRequirements gap analysis Functional AnalystBusiness Analyst - Mission 02 Independent 60 min 3 steps
Validate an event flow
A hands-on lab for technical analysts: follow one payment across Kafka topics, consumer logs, and a dead letter queue, and prove why the settlement event never arrived.
Event flow validationLog analysis QA AnalystSystems Analyst - Mission 03 Open 90 min 3 steps
Investigate a production incident
A hands-on lab for technical analysts: work a duplicate refund incident from the ticket through API responses, request logs, database records, and monitoring, and separate the trigger from the defect.
Incident investigationLog analysisSQL investigation Developer AnalystSystems Analyst
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