Project library

Real projects from people who got the offer — every entry is an interview you can step into. The AI interviewer runs the follow-ups they actually got; you answer, then compare with how they took it. Read the telling before you go in. No matching experience? Build your own version of it.

15 references

BrightloomIntern · 2024
Scripting & automation

A CI check that failed the build when someone forgot a DB migration

People kept merging model changes without the matching migration and breaking staging. I added a CI step that caught it before merge.

ex-Brightloom (mid-size SaaS) SWE Intern
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
PlaidbridgeNew Grad · 2024
Data & ML

An A/B test I was told 'won' — until I checked whether it was even significant

A fintech growth team wanted to ship a new onboarding screen that showed a higher signup rate. As the new analyst, I was asked to write the readout.

Data Analyst (new grad)
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
DatadogIntern · 2023
Scripting & automation

A Slack bot that pinged the on-call when a dashboard went stale

My team kept finding out too late that a monitoring dashboard had stopped updating. I wrote a small bot that noticed first and nudged the right person.

ex-Datadog SWE Intern
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
GoogleIntern · 2023
Course & capstone

A toy compiler front end for a subset of C in my compilers course

I wrote the lexer and parser for a compilers-course project targeting a subset of C. The interview zoomed in on one decision: why recursive descent, and where my grammar quietly cheated.

ex-Google SWE Intern
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
AmazonIntern · 2023
Data & ML

Rebuilt a returns dashboard nobody trusted — and found the numbers were double-counted

An intern inherited a returns-rate dashboard that ops leadership had quietly stopped using. The interesting part is what they found once they actually traced the query.

ex-Amazon Business Intelligence Engineer Intern
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
SalesforceNew Grad · 2023
Part-time & ops

How a no-show sign-up sheet at the tutoring center became my APM story

My only 'work experience' was staffing a university tutoring desk. I turned a small scheduling annoyance I noticed into a story about spotting a problem and nudging a fix.

ex-Salesforce APM (former tutoring-center front desk)
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
StripeNew Grad · 2023
Web app

Campus club room-booking tool

A booking site my student org used to reserve shared practice rooms, replacing a chaotic shared spreadsheet.

ex-Stripe New Grad Engineer
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
Shipbridge LogisticsNew Grad · 2022
Scripting & automation

A scraper + weekly report that replaced a manual carrier-rate spreadsheet

Ops was copy-pasting carrier prices into a spreadsheet by hand every week. I built something that pulled the numbers and emailed the report instead.

ex-Shipbridge Logistics SWE
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
AmazonNew Grad · 2022
Course & capstone

A tiny key-value store with write-ahead logging for my databases course

I built a single-node key-value store for a systems course and it turned into a 30-minute conversation about durability tradeoffs — because I was honest about where it broke.

ex-Amazon SWE New Grad
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
Cerabyte HealthIntern · 2022
Data & ML

A no-show prediction model that looked great — until I found it was reading the future

A small model to predict clinic no-shows hit suspiciously high accuracy in week one. The story is really about the leak I found and how I caught it.

ex-health-tech Data Science Intern
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
AmazonNew Grad (L4) · 2022
Part-time & ops

The 'sticky note on the espresso machine' story that carried my Amazon loop

I had no CS internship, so I told a story about a tiny fix I made behind the counter. It landed because I was precise about what I actually did versus what the store did.

ex-Amazon SDE New Grad (former Starbucks barista)
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
DatadogSWE Intern · 2022
Web app

Internal on-call handoff dashboard

An internal tool that let on-call engineers see the state of a service handoff at a glance instead of digging through three separate systems.

ex-Datadog SWE Intern
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
MicrosoftNew Grad · 2021
Course & capstone

Senior capstone: a room-booking web app that four of us built and only I could explain

A four-person senior capstone building a campus room-booking app. The interesting part of the interview wasn't the tech — it was untangling what I actually did on a team where the work wasn't evenly split.

ex-Microsoft SWE New Grad
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
ShopifyNew Grad (Junior) · 2021
Part-time & ops

The prep-list I made for my family's restaurant, and the follow-up that almost sank it

I worked weekends at my parents' small restaurant. My story was a simple prep checklist I introduced — and the interviewer's probing taught me exactly where I'd over-claimed.

new-grad SWE (former family-restaurant weekend help)
4 real follow-ups Practice this one
GustoFrontend Intern · 2021
Web app

Self-serve plan-change checkout flow

A guided flow that let small-business admins upgrade or downgrade their plan themselves instead of emailing support.

ex-mid-size SaaS Frontend Intern
4 real follow-ups Practice this one