The finish: present, reflect, plan

Copy this into your fork. Three parts: present your capstone out loud, write an honest retrospective, and commit to concrete next steps.

Part 1: capstone presentation (20 min, out loud, no reading)

Walk this shape to an empty room as if an interviewer is there. Jot the notes you will hit, do not write a script.

  • What it does (one sentence):
  • Scale (the numbers):
  • The design (read path, write path):
  • The decision I am proudest of (and the tradeoff):
  • The measured numbers (knee, peak throughput, the bottleneck):
  • Where it breaks, and how it degrades:
  • What I would do next:

After presenting: the part that came out clean, and the part that came out muddled.

Part 2: retrospective (honest, not a victory lap)

  • The single number or result across 60 days that surprised me most, and what it changed:
  • Three things I now reach for automatically that I had not heard of two months ago:
  • The one topic I would still be nervous to be asked about:
  • What I would do differently if I started these 60 days again:

Part 3: learning plan (while the momentum is warm)

Three concrete next steps. Make the first one specific and scheduled.

  1. (scheduled first step): 2. 3.

Ideas: read Designing Data-Intensive Applications a chapter at a time; build the next slice of your capstone and load test it again; do one timed mock a week; read a Jepsen analysis and reproduce its thinking; contribute to an open-source system you now understand.

Part 4: make the work public

  • My fork is public and tidy.
  • A short README points to my capstone architecture doc and my best RESULTS.md files.
  • My last post links the repo and the capstone.

This repo is a portfolio. It shows you did the work, not just watched it.