ORIGINAL COMPANY-CONTEXT PRACTICE
Collect high-rate test equipment events
Original practice scenario inspired by Texas Instruments Incorporated's public business context; this is not a reported interview question or a description of its internal systems. A fictional semiconductor test station sends many measurements per device. The collector must preserve sequence gaps while supporting a lower-volume pass/fail dashboard. Design the ingestion and aggregation path.
Written for independent practice using company context; this is not a verified question from a company interview.
A REASONED APPROACH
Model answer.
Separate raw measurement durability from the dashboard projection. Each station session needs a sequence namespace so missing or repeated messages can be detected without confusing a station restart with normal continuation.
Work through it
- Attach station, session, device, sequence, and event-time identifiers. Acknowledge only after durable acceptance, and deduplicate stable event keys during retries.
- Build device-level summaries from versioned completion rules. Mark a result incomplete when required sequences or measurements are missing rather than inferring pass from the available subset.
- Partition ingestion to preserve necessary per-session ordering and bound queues. Test restart, reordered delivery, sequence gaps, and slow downstream storage while monitoring lag.
Tradeoffs to discuss
- Raw retention enables reprocessing but costs substantial storage. Aggregating near the source reduces bandwidth at the expense of later diagnostic detail.
Common pitfalls
- A global sequence counter can collide after reboot if its session is missing.
- Dashboard freshness does not prove the underlying measurement set is complete.