CI/CD

CI/CD interviews test whether you can ship verified changes safely and quickly—not whether you memorized one YAML keyword. Strong answers connect continuous integration gates, delivery environments, tooling choice, and pipeline quality to team risk and release cadence.

This domain spans CI basics (install, lint, typecheck, tests, build, artifacts), CD basics (environments, secrets, deployment strategies, rollbacks, feature flags), CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins, Argo CD), and pipeline quality (caching, parallelism, matrices, required checks, preview deployments).

On interviews: for a TypeScript product team, sketch PR gates, what runs before merge versus before production, how artifacts promote, and how you would recover from a bad deploy.

Common pitfalls: local hooks as the only gate; transpile-only builds without typecheck; rebuilding per environment instead of promoting artifacts; preview environments on production data.

The trade-off is delivery speed versus reproducibility, security, and operational confidence.

Checklist:

• Make CI authoritative over mechanical verification.
• Promote immutable artifacts through environments.
• Scope secrets and environments by risk.
• Use child topics for stack-specific depth.