Two take-homes

Learn — most candidates over-build the app and under-build the evidence. Reviewers spend about twenty minutes and have five other submissions waiting.

Do — two, timed to their real budget (one at 4h, one at 8h). Standard shapes: a REST API with auth, pagination and rate limiting; a CSV or log ingest pipeline with idempotent retries; a small CLI with a plugin interface.

Check —

• Tests cover the unhappy paths, not the happy one
• Errors are typed and logged with a request ID
• README says: how to run it, the design decisions, and what you skipped and why
• You stopped at the time budget and said so

Ship — both repos, public.

The "what I skipped and why" section is the single highest-signal thing in a take-home. It is also the one almost nobody writes.