Debos — Live problem-solving interview
October 2024
Two-part technical interview; the real test was a design problem — a search box hitting a backend with highly variable latency: how do you handle it? My answer, three layers: a minimum query length, a 200–500 ms debounce, and an AbortController cancelling the in-flight request so a slower earlier response can't overwrite a newer one — the classic typeahead race condition. Hired on the spot; joined as an external consultant, then moved in-house. I later shipped exactly this in production — a full-stack device search (React + .NET + PostgreSQL trigram indexes).


