Capstones you already write in Learn.

Page an API, validate rows, log counts, and return clean order ids.

Declare grain, aggregate payments first, and project a fact table from source headers.

Duplicate keys, mixed types, gnarly dates, nulls: bronze to silver in pandas, same instinct as Spark medallion.

First Lakebench SQL drills on employees, departments, and customers. Filters, aggregates, and beginner joins.

First Lakebench Python drills: flatten lists, hash maps, merge sorted lists, and two sum.

Hashing, two pointers, and sliding windows from the Lakebench Python 70 set.

Dedup replayed events, sessionize, and reconcile GMV. Beginner production ticket plus a Lakebench SQL session drill.

Vectorized cleaning, groupby GMV, and melt/pivot reshapes on order frames. Five Pandas interview drills end to end.

Keep bronze → silver → gold, then apply a second micro-batch with a Delta-style latest-wins MERGE.

Bronze (raw) → silver (deduped) → gold (business metric) in one script.

Walk extract → load in order, skip duplicate keys, retry a flaky extract. Still a simulation. Still the right habits.

Layer a staging CTE, project a paid-orders mart, and return unique-test violators on order_id (zero in this warehouse).

Wire not-null, unique, and row-count on df_orders. Print a summary dict of booleans. Project the frame you would actually publish.

Running totals, ranks, sessionization, and multi-CTE business questions from the Lakebench SQL set.

Binary trees, BFS/DFS islands, and course schedule from the Lakebench Python set.

Broken DAG, silver dupes, FinOps scan, and driver OOM. Four tickets that mirror a bad Friday deploy.

Fix collect() OOM, broadcast joins, and partition tuning on simulated Spark. Interview PySpark plus production RCA.

One Lakebench SQL filter drill, one DSA hash map, and a timed practice loop. Mimics a 45-minute DE screen.

Broken pipeline RCA, duplicate grain test, and the quality-suite capstone publish checklist in one sitting.

A numbered GCP free-tier checklist: bucket, bronze file, BigQuery, a query, a README screenshot. The last mile is still outside this tab.

Three orders on FakeKafkaTopic, one behind the watermark. Keep the on-time keys and commit those offsets.

git commit, docker build, ci test, terraform plan, deploy. The grader checks the order. The daemon, cluster, and cloud stay on your machine.

Merge CDC batches into a slowly changing dimension without overlapping windows. Production ticket plus Lakebench SCD drill.

Read EXPLAIN output, cut bytes scanned, and pass the FinOps score bar on a GMV aggregation ticket.

One path from click to dashboard at 500M events/day. Every hop points at a lesson you already did. The whiteboard is the work.