Areas of Strength

• Clear Requirements Framing: Quickly outlined functional requirements and partially addressed key non-functional aspects.
  
  
• Structured System Design: Presented a step-by-step high-level architecture that allowed for deep dives and iterative refinement.
  
  
• Protocol Exploration: Proactively discussed communication options such as Server-Sent Events (SSE).
  
  
• Strong Dedup Strategy: Designed practical deduplication using idempotency keys, TTL policies, and Redis-backed coordination.
  
  
• Scalable Job Orchestration: Proposed job queues and a dispatcher pattern to handle varied workloads.
  
  
  
• State Machine Thinking: Initiated a discussion on execution state modeling with opportunities for deeper expansion.
  
  

Areas for Improvement (with opportunities to deep dive with more details):

• Execution Flow Modeling: Strengthen the end-to-end story across initiation → scheduling → execution → post-processing to clarify component boundaries and system handoffs.
  
  
• Deeper Entity Relationships: While artifacts, tasks, and workflow execution were and emphasize how their interactions reduce redundant work (e.g., skipping builds when artifacts exist).
  
  
• State Machine Expansion: Go deeper into state transitions and retry semantics to demonstrate mastery of execution lifecycle design.
  
  
• Hot Partition Handling: Expand on quota-based fairness strategies to mitigate load concentration across repositories.
  
  
• Failure Handling: Provided thoughtful approaches to retries, backoff, cancellations (e.g., SIGKILL), and zombie job cleanup via heartbeats.

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