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      "slug": "cron-scheduler-take-home",
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      "body_md": "## What they ask\nThe backend take-home has been the same brief since 2021, and the company keeps it in a public repository on its GitHub organisation. After the intro call an engineer sends you the link and a deadline, and the task comes back in the onsite loop as a dedicated discussion round.\n\nBuild an in-process cron scheduler that accepts a job and runs it periodically. A client registers a job with:\n- an expected duration for a single run, for example `30m`,\n- a frequency, for example `1hr` for a job that should run every hour,\n- the job itself, a function,\n- a unique job identifier.\n\nThe solution must run several jobs concurrently, ship with tests, and instrument every run (actual execution time, logging). It has to be written in Go, Java, Python, C++, Ruby or JavaScript, and it must not lean on a scheduling library. The brief names Java's `ScheduledExecutorService.scheduleAtFixedRate` as the kind of shortcut that is not allowed.\n\nThe README is graded as hard as the code. They ask for a short description, the reasoning behind your technical decisions, the trade-offs you made, usage snippets, and what you would improve next.\n\n## What candidates built\nPublished solutions cluster around three shapes: a priority queue keyed by next run time with worker threads, a plain loop per job with sleeps, and an actor-style design with a timer actor, a scheduler actor and one monitor per job. Deleting a job is a common pain point, and a tombstone set checked when the job reaches the head of the queue is the usual answer.\n\n## What they look for\n- A clear policy for the run that overruns its frequency: skip, queue, or run in parallel, and why.\n- What the expected duration is for. The good answer is a timeout and a metric, not a sleep.\n- Fixed rate versus fixed delay, and how you keep drift out of the schedule.\n- Thread safety when jobs are added or removed while the scheduler is running, and a graceful shutdown that lets in-flight runs finish.\n- Tests that do not sleep for real minutes: an injectable clock or a tiny tick granularity.\n- A README that reads like an engineer explaining a design to a colleague.",
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