IntermediatePROBLEM_SOLVING
Based on your experience as a graduate Software Engineer from the University of Karachi, describe a challenging debugging or problem-solving scenario you faced in your academic or personal projects, how you approached isolating the root cause, and how you validated your final fix.
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General

Sample Answer

In my final year project, we built a real-time classroom attendance system in React and Node. A week before our demo, the app started randomly freezing when more than 20 students checked in at once. CPU stayed low, but response times spiked from ~200ms to 5–6 seconds. Instead of guessing, I added detailed timestamped logs around each API call and used Chrome DevTools and Node’s profiler. That showed a single MongoDB query blocking the event loop during a batch write. I refactored that part to use bulkWrite with proper indexes and moved some work to a background job. We then load-tested with 100+ concurrent check-ins using k6 and saw p95 latency drop back under 250ms with zero freezes over a 30-minute run. We also added a simple dashboard to monitor response times so we could catch regressions early.

Keywords

Clear description of the bug and impact with metricsSystematic logging and profiling instead of guessingTargeted fix using database optimization and background jobsValidation via load testing and monitoring
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