Fix the pipeline_
NovaMart is adopting DevOps — their loop is slow & unhealthy, and you're the consultant they called
NovaMart called. Their pipeline is dying.
NovaMart, an online retailer, ships one release every six weeks — by hand, on Fridays. Builds fail at random, every server is a hand-crafted snowflake, and they learn about outages from angry tweets. Pipeline health: 20%. They've hired you to guide their DevOps adoption, one decision at a time.
12 decisions across three difficulty levels. Higher levels pay more — 100 / 200 / 300 pts plus a scaled speed bonus — but the wrong answers get sneakier: level 3 traps sound almost right. You get 15s / 20s / 25s to think, by level. Bad calls and timeouts score nothing and slow NovaMart down even further. Max run: 3600 pts. Your best run goes on the leaderboard.
That was the game. Here's how you actually learn it.
However that round went — I got certified through PagerDuty & LinkedIn's DevOps Professional Certificate, and if your job or school gives you LinkedIn Learning, you likely already have access to it too. Here's everything I used to prepare: course notes, a 102-question exam simulator, and a full interview guide. Free and open source.