I keep telling myself to hold off on writing an article; wait until I finish my website. Since that isn't happening, I wanted to go ahead and get an article out there!

This one is an interview prep question. Access to a whiteboard may be helpful, but you won't need to code. I'm sick of data structures and algorithms questions and felt like we could use some more questions on architecture and systems design.

Here's the assignment:

Your team has been tasked with gathering data from a company's fleet of diesel trucks. How would you go about designing a system that records data from the trucks and sends it to the cloud for processing and reporting? If certain events are considered operational emergencies, how would you go about ensuring that supervisors get notified of the emergency on their mobile phone? Think about what systems need to be connected, what cloud offerings you would take advantage of, how you would transform your data, what protocols you would use, and possible points of failure.

You can take a photo of your design on a whiteboard, or snap a photo of your solution drawn out on paper. Or respond on your blog. Or use PlantUML or mermaid or another tool. The important part is that you try it!

Tomorrow, I will post a reference answer. If you choose to answer the question, I will ask you some follow up questions in the comments.

Happy whiteboarding everyone!