Abdullah Mohammed abodacs

Act as my backend engineering interview mentor for top-tier software engineering internships. I am preparing for interviews where I need to demonstrate not just knowledge of backend technologies, but the ability to reason about systems, understand what happens underneath abstractions, identify bottlenecks, debug failures, and make engineering trade-offs. Every day, give me exactly ONE backend engineering interview problem.

Daily Rotation

Strictly rotate between these categories:

Day A — Core Engineering / Internals

Give me a deep conceptual problem involving one or more of:

Databases

B-trees and indexes
Database pages and storage layout

/grill-me for research and planning
/taste-review to let Codex make more tasteful design decisions by asking Claude (you'll need the claude CLI installed for this)
/vercel-react-best-practices for improving the quality of React component these agents generated
/simplify to improve code quality, reduce comment wordiness, and improve system architecture
/test-desktop-app to test Electron apps end-to-end. If you work on a different kind of app, write your own version!

description	Implement with clear orchestration, strong interfaces, and happy-path-first design

Code like Luke.

Implement the requested change, but optimize the design for the normal user flow. If the happy path is 95% of runtime behavior, it should be approximately 95% of the code readers see.

Start with context:

inspect the existing code, callsites, data flow, and nearby conventions

name

govuk-style

description

Write and edit in GOV.UK / GDS house style — plain English, active voice, front-loaded content, sentence case, and no bold or italics for emphasis. Use when writing or editing reports, research write-ups, guidance, documentation, summaries, or any prose where clarity and accessibility matter.

user-invokable

true

args

name	description	required
target	The document or text to write or rewrite in GOV.UK style (optional)	false

LLM Wiki v2

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs. Extended with lessons from building agentmemory, a persistent memory engine for AI coding agents.

This builds on Andrej Karpathy's original LLM Wiki idea file. Everything in the original still applies. This document adds what we learned running the pattern in production: what breaks at scale, what's missing, and what separates a wiki that stays useful from one that rots.

What the original gets right

The core insight is correct: stop re-deriving, start compiling. RAG retrieves and forgets. A wiki accumulates and compounds. The three-layer architecture (raw sources, wiki, schema) works. The operations (ingest, query, lint) cover the basics. If you haven't read the original, start there.

name	no-use-effect
description	Enforce the no-useEffect rule when writing or reviewing React code. ACTIVATE when writing React components, refactoring existing useEffect calls, reviewing PRs with useEffect, or when an agent adds useEffect "just in case." Provides the five replacement patterns and the useMountEffect escape hatch.

No useEffect

name	Logging Best Practices
description	Use before implementing logs in a medium to large scale production system.

This skill is adpated from "Logging sucks. And here's how to make it better. by Boris Tane.

When helping with logging, observability, or debugging strategies, follow these principles:

Core Philosophy

description

Interview me about the plan

argument-hint

plan

model

opus

Read this plan file $1 and interview me in detail using the AskUserQuestionTool about literally anything: technical implementation, UI & UX, concerns, tradeoffs, etc. but make sure the questions are not obvious.

	/*
	* Fluid Modular Type Scale
	*
	* A pure-CSS fluid typography system that smoothly scales font sizes
	* between a minimum and maximum viewport width using a modular scale.
	*
	* Based on the great work of those at Clearleft, modified for modern css (pow())
	* (https://utopia.fyi/blog/css-modular-scales/)
	*
	* Required custom properties (set on a parent or :root):

	# Linter will ignore these directories
	IGNORE_LINT_DIRS = .venv\|venv
	LINE_LENGTH = 88

	install_tools:
	@echo "$(YELLOW)🔧Installing tools...$(RESET)"
	@uv tool install black --force
	@uv tool install ruff --force
	@uv tool install ty --force
	@uv tool install vulture --force