A free night shift for data engineers
2 AM Pager_
You are the new on-call engineer at KiranaKart, a made-up quick-commerce startup. For the next 15 minutes the pages keep coming. Triage the incidents, fix broken SQL that runs against real data, and write the postmortem your manager reads in the morning.
At the end you get a level, a public proof page with the code you wrote and the traps it caught, and a challenge link for a friend.
Free. The clock starts when the first page arrives, not before.
Best on a laptop. Act 2 means writing and running SQL. You can start on a phone; a keyboard makes Act 2 easier.
On a phone? 4-minute quick mode.
Act 1 alone: five pages, one four-minute clock, an unverified level at the end. No sign-in.
Try quick modeThis week's leaderboard.
Opt-in, first names only, resets every Monday. Your best verified full shift of the week counts.
See the boardThe shift: 15 minutes, three acts
Act 1 · Triage4 min
Five incidents, 45 seconds each. Read the alert and the clue, pick an answer, then bet: I'm sure or Best guess. One lifeline for the whole shift.
120 or more in triage puts you on the senior track in Act 2.
Act 2 · Fix it8 min
Two hands-on tasks, 4 minutes each. Each starts from a broken query and a sample dataset. Run it, fix it, submit it. Your SQL is graded against hidden data with traps planted in it.
Act 3 · Morning standup3 min
A 400-character postmortem on one of your two tasks, then one design call. Arjun reads it at 9 AM.
Up to 1,000 points. Levels: Fresher, DE1, DE2, Senior, Staff-ready. The result is Arjun's review at 9:00 AM.
Tonight's cast
Arjun
Engineering manager
Pager alerts, escalations and the morning review
Neha
Product analyst
"The dashboard looks wrong" messages
Meera
Finance controller
Revenue, reconciliation and cost questions
Vikram
Platform engineer
Spark, streaming and cluster problems
What you walk away with
A proof page anyone can open: your level, your score out of 1,000, the SQL you submitted, which hidden traps it caught, and your postmortem exactly as you wrote it. Every run gets freshly generated data, so a copied query fails unless it is actually correct.
Timed and unproctored, said plainly
The proof page counts paste events and the times your tab lost focus, and shows them as plain facts. You can hide your proof, or only your code and postmortem, at any time. One shift every 14 days.