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Explore bite-sized insights, real-world examples, and key takeaways on essential tech concepts — made simple, practical, and impactful for curious minds and seasoned professionals alike.
As engineering managers and developers, we often look for ways to speed up our workflows without sacrificing quality. Cursor, a code editor enhanced with AI capabilities, is one of those tools that, when used effectively, can be a true productivity multiplier. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with it in real-world scenarios ;
building features, iterating on logic, and exploring new ideas.
Here’s a distilled set of practices that worked well.
1. Use Sonnet for Code-Heavy Tasks
Cursor offers different models, but I’ve found Sonnet particularly effective for code. It’s faster, more reliable, and better at understanding context when the task is purely programming-related. Of course, it comes with some extra $$
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2. Start a New Chat for New Features
When building something new, don’t clutter existing threads. A fresh chat keeps the scope clean, avoids accidental overwrites, and helps Cursor focus on the new feature instead of dragging in irrelevant context.
3. Provide Feedback — What Works, What Doesn’t
Cursor learns best when you guide it. If it suggests code that breaks existing logic or doesn’t align with your architecture, tell it. This prevents cascading mistakes and ensures the assistant builds on top of the right foundations.
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4. Reuse Context From Old Chats
When extending or refining an existing feature, bring in snippets or references from past chats. This helps Cursor understand continuity and prevents it from reinventing already-working code.
5. Use Ask Mode for Code Questions
Cursor provides two main modes: Agent and Ask. For generating code, Agent works fine. But when only asking precise code-related questions, switch to Ask Mode — it’s sharper and less verbose.
Pro tip: Ask mode uses relatively less tokens, so save those $$for sonnet mode.
6. Always Tag Files for Clarity
When referencing code, tag files explicitly.
Example: @main.ts for the core logic
Example: Panel.tsx for feature listings
This helps Cursor focus on the right file and avoid mixing unrelated logic.
7. Review Code Midway & Iterate With File Names
Don’t wait until the end to review. Midway through, ask Cursor to refine specific files — mentioning them by name. Iteration with file-level precision reduces cleanup time and avoids surprises later.
8. Use @Web for Research
Instead of manually Googling, use Cursor’s @Web feature to pull in fresh information. It’s especially useful for comparing libraries, exploring API usage, or checking security considerations.
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9. Explore Official Docs With @Docs
When working with frameworks or libraries, @Docs is invaluable. Instead of scanning endless documentation pages, let Cursor fetch and summarize directly from official sources.
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10. Use Images for Layout Context
Cursor isn’t limited to text. You can drop screenshots or sketches of UI layouts, and it will translate them into code structure. This works great for dashboards, component alignments, or mobile screens.
11. Add .cursorrules in the Root Directory
One hidden gem: Cursor always listens to the .cursorrules file if it exists at the project root. Define conventions, dos and don’ts, and style preferences here. This ensures consistency without repeating instructions every time.
Final Thoughts
Cursor is not a magic wand — it’s a tool that shines when used with structure and intention. By setting clear boundaries, reviewing iteratively, and leveraging features like @Web, @Docs, and .cursorrules, you can make Cursor a powerful coding partner for your team.
Used well, it won’t just save time; it will also elevate the quality of your codebase.
Last but not least, as the russian proverb goes, be it human or the code.
Microservices architecture has become the de facto standard for designing scalable, resilient, and sustainable software systems. Organizations from startups to enterprises are quickly moving away from monoliths to microservices. This transition is creating a demand for developers who understand not just the what but also the why and how of microservices.
This architectural style of designing and developing software applications involves dividing an application into various, independent services that are separate and distinct from each other, with each one developed, deployed, and maintained independently. Although there are numerous advantages of using microservices, there are a few drawbacks that need to be taken into account.
Whether you are a fresher developer looking to enter backend development or an experienced developer gearing up for a senior position, learning microservices is essential to differentiate yourself during interviews and contribute positively to contemporary software teams.
Here’s what we’re going to cover in this guide:
Top 10 Microservices interview questions and answers with a focus on experienced professionals
3 easy-to-understand questions and answers to help beginners enter microservices
Tips and best practices sprinkled throughout to give you an edge in real-world interviews
Let’s get started.
Top 10 Microservices Interview Questions and Answers
1. How do you handle communication between microservices?
Answer: There are two main ways: synchronous (usually by HTTP REST or gRPC) and asynchronous (by messaging queues like RabbitMQ, Kafka, or AWS SNS/SQS).
Use REST/gRPC when a real-time response is required.
Use event-driven messaging for decoupling and fault-tolerance.
Here is a tip: In interviews, demonstrate knowledge of event sourcing and CQRS since they are gaining popularity in distributed systems.
2. What database management techniques do you employ in microservices?
Answer: Ideally, every microservice should maintain its database (Database per Service pattern) to achieve loose coupling and data encapsulation.
For consistency, apply:
Sagas for handling distributed transactions
Eventual consistency as a guiding principle
Change Data Capture (CDC) for synchronizing among services
3. How do you make your microservices resilient and fault-tolerant?
Fault tolerance ensures that the system remains functional at all times, enhancing user experience. It also makes things much easier for software teams.
Example: When Service A relies on Service B, and B is not available, a Circuit Breaker avoids A getting flooded with failed calls and may resort to fallback logic.
4. How do you design and deploy microservices securely?
Answer: Important practices for microservices secure deployment are:
OAuth2 / JWT for stateless authentication
Mutual TLS for service-to-service encryption
API Gateway to secure, rate-limit, and route centrally
Secrets Management with Vault or AWS Secrets Manager
Here is a tip: Display awareness of zero trust architecture and securing internal APIs, not only external-facing ones.
5. How do you log and monitor across microservices?
Answer: To log and monitor across each microservice, follow these steps.
Use centralized logging: ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) or EFK (Fluentd)
Use distributed tracing tools such as Jaeger or Zipkin
Integrate with monitoring tools: Prometheus + Grafana
Here is a tip: Describe the usage of correlation IDs between services to follow end-to-end requests.
6. What are microservices’ challenges, and how do you address them?
Answer: While microservices offer flexibility and modularity, they are not free from challenges. Development teams often face many challenges that might include:
Data consistency → Utilize event-driven architecture
Deployment complexity → Implement CI/CD Pipelines and Kubernetes
Service discovery → Utilize tools such as Consul, Eureka, or K8s DNS
Versioning → Address through backward-compatible API design or versioned endpoints
7. How do you configure microservices?
Answer: Configuring microservices architecture may include managing and maintaining the settings that control the behavior of each microservice. These settings can include database connections, API keys, feature toggles, and environment-specific configurations. Here are some best practices:
Utilize centralized config servers (e.g., Spring Cloud Config)
Use environment-specific configurations using tools such as Kubernetes ConfigMaps and Secrets
Make configurations immutable in production
Here is a tip: Talk about feature toggles and dynamic configuration reload mechanisms.
8. Describe the role of the API Gateway in microservices?
Answer: An API Gateway is a single entry point to all clients, and offers:
Routing to suitable services
Authentication & Authorization
Rate limiting & Throttling
Load balancing and Caching
Popular options: Kong, NGINX, AWS API Gateway, Istio (in service mesh)
9. How do you deploy microservices into production?
Answer: Deploying microservices into production typically involves several key steps and considerations to ensure reliability, scalability, and maintainability. You can deploy using container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm.
Best practices:
Blue-Green or Canary Deployments
Health checks & readiness probes
Automated rollbacks on failure
Observability baked into the CI/CD pipeline
10. What is a service mesh, and when do I use one?
Answer: A service mesh is an infrastructure layer that governs service-to-service communication in microservices systems. It takes care of functions such as traffic routing, security, observability, and resiliency, hiding these complexities from individual services. You employ a service mesh when you’re working with a distributed application with lots of microservices and want to handle their interactions effectively and reliably.
(e.g., Istio, Linkerd) is an infrastructure layer that manages:
Service discovery
Traffic management
Security (mTLS)
Observability (telemetry, tracing)
Use case: When you have lots of services talking to each other internally and want to have uniform governance, security, and resilience without adding additional code in every service.
Here are some Q&A for freshers:
Microservices Questions and Answers for Freshers
1. What is microservices architecture?
Answer:Microservices architecture refers to the design of software as a set of small, stand-alone, deployable services. Every service addresses one business capability, exchanges messages across the network, and can be developed and scaled separately.
2. What are the major benefits of microservices?
Answer: Microservices provide many benefits centered around key areas such as greater agility, shorter development cycles, better scalability, and more robust fault isolation. These are derived from decomposing applications into smaller independent services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
Major benefits are:
Scalability: Scale individual services on demand
Flexibility: Employ various tech stacks per service
Faster deployments: Independent teams
Resilience: One service failure doesn’t bring down the entire application
3. How do microservices contrast with monolithic architecture?
Answer: Microservices and monolithic designs are fundamentally different design methodologies for constructing software applications. Monolithic design consists of one, tightly bound codebase, whereas microservices decompose applications into smaller, independent, and loosely coupled services. This difference results in drastic differences in development, deployment, scaling, and fault tolerance.
Aspect
Monolith
Microservices
Deployment
Single unit
Individual services
Scaling
Whole app
Per service
Development
Tightly coupled
Loosely coupled
Technology choice
Uniform
Polyglot possible
Tip for Freshers: Understand the progression from monolith → SOA → microservices.
Bonus Tips for Interview Success
Use real-world experience when answering questions, even small-scale microservices projects or side projects.
Trade-offs: When not to use Microservices
Microservices aren’t a silver bullet. You should know when not to use them. Here is the complete list of reasons when you should not use Microservices Architectures:
Here are the Anti-Patterns of Microservices:
Don’t do Distributed Monolith
Ensure that you break your services down correctly and adhere to the decoupling principle, such as using bounded context and business capabilities principles.
Don’t implement microservices without DevOps or cloud services
Microservices adopt the distributed cloud-native patterns. And you can only reap the benefits of microservices by adhering to the following cloud-native principles:
Some of them are:
CI/CD pipeline with DevOps automations
Correct deployment and monitoring tools
Managed cloud services to back your infrastructure
Follow Key enabling technologies and tools such as Containers, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Broken dependencies with the following async communications using Messaging and event streaming services.
When having limited team sizes, small Teams
If you do not have a team size that can manage the microservice workloads, this would only lead to a delay in delivery. For a small team, a microservice architecture can be difficult to justify, since the team is needed just to deal with the deployment and management of the microservices themselves.
Launching Brand new products or with startups
If you are building a new startup or a completely new product that needs deep change when you build and keep iterating your product, then you should not begin with microservices.
