The scope of this thing is genuinely absurd for a single interview session.
Start by clarifying requirements and constraints, then outline a high-level architecture that separates concerns: connection handling, command parsing, room management, and persistence. Walk through the core components and data flow, emphasizing trade-offs and scalability considerations. Finally, discuss how you would leverage AI tools to accelerate development while ensuring correctness.
Pro tip: Demonstrate awareness of real-world challenges like handling partial TCP messages, graceful shutdowns, and idempotent reconnection. Mention that you'd use AI to generate boilerplate but rigorously test edge cases like message ordering and persistence consistency.
Ask about expected scale (concurrent users, rooms), persistence guarantees (e.g., durability vs. performance), and reconnection semantics (e.g., session resumption vs. new session). This shows you think before coding.
Propose a modular design: a TCP server (e.g., using asyncio or Netty) that accepts connections, a command parser, a room manager, and a persistence layer (e.g., Redis for history, database for user data). Emphasize separation of concerns for scalability.
Explain how slash commands are parsed and executed, how broadcast messaging works within rooms, and how reconnection is handled (e.g., via unique client IDs and session tokens). Describe how message history is stored and retrieved (e.g., Redis lists with capped length).
Discuss scaling horizontally with multiple server instances behind a load balancer, using a pub/sub system (e.g., Redis Pub/Sub) for cross-instance broadcasts. Explain persistence strategies: write-through caching for history, periodic snapshots, or append-only logs.
Mention using AI to generate boilerplate (e.g., TCP server setup, command parsing) and to suggest optimizations. Highlight trade-offs: e.g., in-memory vs. persistent storage, consistency vs. latency, and complexity of reconnection logic.
AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.