Here is a proposed stack for a personal todo app. React to it.
Answer it out loud before you open anything. The value of the flags below is in comparing them to what you actually said — including whether you asked who uses it before naming what you would build it with.
A candidate was asked to design a todo app for one user — themselves — and pinned their proposed architecture to the doc. You are the next interviewer and have the list in front of you.
React to this
Say what you would question, what you would keep, and what you would need to know first.
Proposed architecture — "Personal Todo App" (illustrative): - React frontend (Next.js) with SSR - API gateway - Five microservices: users, todos, tags, notifications, search - Kafka for events between services - Redis for caching todo lists - PostgreSQL per service - Elasticsearch for searching todos - Kubernetes (3-node cluster) with autoscaling - Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD Requirement, as stated by the interviewer: "a todo app for yourself."
What it is really testing
Whether the candidate recognises complexity without a requirement behind it, can apply the complexity ledger to each component — what it solves, what it introduces, what happens when it fails — and can say what the app actually needs while leaving room for the day it would need more.