03 — Applied work
Project briefs
Every brief is scoped like a work item: a problem statement, hard requirements, deliverables and the criteria it will be reviewed against.
- Briefs
- 6
- Difficulty range
- Beginner → Advanced
- Typical scope
- 2–6 weeks
- Review
- Written
- Application
Document Q&A Application
Build a service that ingests a document corpus, indexes it, and answers natural-language questions with citations pointing back to the source passage.
PythonFastAPIVector DBIntermediate3 weeks - Product
Multi-tenant SaaS Platform
Design and build a multi-tenant application where tenant isolation, roles and billing state are enforced at the data layer, not in the UI.
TypeScriptReactPostgreSQLAdvanced6 weeks - Lab
Security Lab
Stand up a deliberately vulnerable environment, compromise it, then patch each weakness and document the before-and-after.
LinuxBurpWiresharkIntermediate4 weeks - Analysis
Operational Data Dashboard
Take a messy operational dataset, model it properly, and produce a dashboard that someone would actually make a decision with.
SQLPythonChartsBeginner2 weeks - Service
Versioned REST API
Design a REST API from resources up: write the specification first, implement against it, then version it without breaking existing clients.
Node.jsPostgresOpenAPIBeginner2 weeks - Infrastructure
Cloud Deployment Pipeline
Build a delivery pipeline that provisions infrastructure declaratively, deploys automatically, and rolls back on its own when a deploy goes wrong.
DockerTerraformCI/CDAdvanced3 weeks
Questions
Questions, answered
01How is a brief structured?
Context, technical requirements, deliverables and review criteria — written the way an engineering team would hand the work to you.
02Is there a fixed stack?
Briefs specify constraints and interfaces, not brand names, unless the constraint is the point. Choose the stack you can defend.
03How is work reviewed?
Against the criteria published in the brief: correctness, clarity of design, handling of edge cases and the quality of the written reasoning.
04Can I publish what I build?
Yes — the work is yours. Strong builds can also be submitted for the showcase.