Look Ma, No Mouse! - Keyboard Shortcuts
Capture the Flag - Command Line Flags & Arguments
Bits, Bytes, and Pieces - Foundational CS Concepts
Cache Money - Hardware, Memory, and Runtime
Mind Your Slang-uage - GS Specific Tech
100

In the Linux command line, if a running script or server gets stuck in an infinite loop, hitting this shortcut sends a SIGINT signal to forcefully kill the process.

What is Ctrl + C?

100

rm -r

What is recursive delete?

100

Languages like Java, Python, and Go run this automatic memory-management process, which reclaims heap space from objects no longer reachable by the program — so you never have to call free() yourself.

What is garbage collection?

100

Expressed in Big-O notation, this is the worst-case time complexity of accessing an arbitrary element by its index in a standard contiguous array.

What is O(1) (or constant time)?

100

This phrase stands for NDS and references an individual’s computer at the firm.

What is Network Desktop Solution?

200

When working in a browser or an electron app, pressing this key by itself will immediately open the Developer Tools.

What is F12?

200

mkdir -p </this/is/a/path>

What is parent directory create?

200

This attack slips malicious input like ' OR 1=1' into an unsanitized query string; parameterized statements and prepared queries are the standard defense.

What is SQL injection?

200

Along with the NOR gate, this inverted-conjunction gate is designated as a "universal gate" because any boolean logic function can be synthesized entirely from it

What is a NAND gate?

200

This 4-letter acronym is the firm's internal network, and it's the one Kubernetes pods get an overlay network on top of.

What is GSINet?

300

To find a file anywhere in your workspace, you can press shift twice in IntelliJ or this in VS Code (default keybindings).

What is Ctrl + P?

300

git rebase -i <ref>

What is interactive rebase?

300

This AI technique involves giving a language model access to an external knowledge base at query time, reducing hallucinations by grounding answers in retrieved documents.

What is a RAG? (Retrieval Augmented Generation)

300

When searching an unweighted tree with uniform branching factor bb and shallowest goal depth dd, Breadth-First Search (BFS) consumes this worst-case auxiliary space complexity.

What is O(b^d)?

300

Any human production access that can change things outside the SDLC needs peer approval and a post-access review. At GS, this tool enforces it.

What is PACT?

400

In SecView, this shortcut lets you set the source database.

What is Alt + Z?

400

grep -i "test" file.txt

What is ignore case?

400

This OSI model layer, the third from the bottom, is responsible for logical addressing and routing packets between different networks — it's where IP operates.

What is the Network Layer

400

When a deeply pipelined superscalar processor incorrectly guesses the outcome of a conditional jump, it must flush all speculative instructions in flight, incurring this penalty that costs roughly 10 to 20 clock cycles.

What is a branch misprediction penalty?

400

Included in most workspace images, this docker-like container engine is how you run containers in Cloud Developer Workspaces.

What is Podman?

500

Instead of typing out the word "clear" in a Linux bash terminal, engineers hit this 2-key shortcut to instantly wipe the screen.

What is Ctrl + L?

500

curl -H <url>

What is HTTP header?

500

Introduced to modern browsers to mitigate cross site request forgery (CSRF) attacks, this cookie attribute restricts when cookies are attached to cross-site requests using modes such as "Strict" or "Lax".

What is the SameSite attribute?

500

Named after speculative execution side channels discovered in modern superscalar CPUs, this class of vulnerabilities bypasses software boundary checks by transiently loading unauthorized memory into the cache before a branch condition resolves.

What is Spectre?

500

After this long without logging in, Laia deletes your workspace and its EBS volumes, and everything in /home/developer is lost.

What is 90 days?

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