The CAP Theorem Question Every Senior System Design Interview Asks

Book: System Design Pocket Guide: Fundamentals Also by me: Database Playbook My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub You walk into the system design loop. Forty minutes in, the interviewer draws three letters on the whiteboard: C, A, P. They ask you to pick two. You say "AP, because partitions happen and we need availability." They nod. Then they ask the question that separates the senior candidates fro