Nobody teaches you how to think like a senior engineer because the people who can teach it are too busy doing it.
They review your PR and leave one comment that reframes the entire thing — "what happens when this queue backs up under load?" — and suddenly you see the hole you walked right past. You fix it. You move on. But that moment of recognition, oh, I wasn't looking at the right layer, evaporates in a week. And the next system you design, you walk past a different hole.
Most learning resources don't even try to replicate that loop. They teach you what senior engineers know. Not how they see.
That's what I've been trying to build.
The Senior Leap
github.com/MohammadiSina/the-senior-leap
Each exercise gives you a broken or incomplete system. You write your analysis before looking at anything else — your findings, your reasoning, whatever you're uncertain about.
Then you open the rubric.
The rubric isn't a list of correct answers. It's written from the perspective of a senior engineer reviewing your work: the failure mode you didn't consider, the question that reframes the whole problem, the thing that looks fine until it pages someone at 3am six months from now.
That gap between what you wrote and what the rubric surfaces — that's the rep. That's the instinct being built, one scenario at a time.
There's also an AI evaluator that reads your analysis alongside the rubric and gives you direct feedback on what you caught, what you missed, and why it would have mattered. Including answers to whatever you flagged as uncertain. Runs locally through Ollama if you don't want to touch any cloud API.
Where it's at
There aren't that many exercises yet.
I'm not going to spin that. The repo is early, the structure is solid, and the content is still being built out. What I can't build alone is what makes exercises worth doing: scenarios that came from something real.
This is a specific ask
Every exercise in this repo started as a production incident, a hard architectural call, or a gotcha that changed how someone thinks about systems. Not a textbook problem. Something that actually happened.
If you've been a senior engineer long enough to have accumulated those moments — the outage that changed how you think about monitoring, the design decision that seemed obvious until it wasn't, the bug that only appeared at scale — those stories are exercises waiting to be written.
The contribution isn't code. It's writing down the thing you wish you'd known before the incident.
The template is in CONTRIBUTING.md. Short version: write the scenario, write what most people would miss, write the question a senior would ask. That's it. If you can describe the moment you got burned and what it taught you, you can write an exercise.
The best ones on this repo will come from people who've lived through the thing the exercise is about. If that's you — I'm specifically asking.
⭐ Star it on GitHub if this is something you want to exist in the world.