Week 24 - Defense¶
Conceptual Core¶
A capstone that isn't defended is unfinished. Write up what you built, present it (even if only to a rubber duck or an LLM playing skeptic), and rehearse the answers to the questions you do not yet have answers to.
Deliverables¶
- Postmortem-style writeup (5–15 pages): goals, what you built, design choices and their alternatives, surprises, things you would do differently, things you would do next.
- Demo script (10–20 minutes): walk through the system, run a chaos scenario live, show the dashboards reacting, recover.
- Open issues file: every known limitation, with a triage tag (
won't fix,next version,bug,tech debt). - Publish: GitHub-public the repo. Write a blog post. (If you finish the curriculum and don't publish, the curriculum did not finish you.)
The defense questions to rehearse¶
- "Why this design and not the alternative I'm thinking of?"
- "What happens at 10x the load? At 100x?"
- "What's the worst bug still in here?"
- "How would you re-architect this knowing what you know now?"
- "What did you learn about the JVM that you couldn't have learned without building this?"
Hardening slice¶
Final commit on the hardening/ template includes a "capstone-grade checklist" - every box your project ticked.