Show me your back-end

I was in an interview with a company today and I struggled to convey my experience in full-stack development beyond years of experience, since that's a metric that doesn't really say anything.

I know what I can do, but I'm conscious that interpreting YoE is hard because a dilettante with 4 YoE could have dabbled in a few projects a year and called it a day, while an absolute grinder touts the same 4 YoE, where they worked as a full time engineer every waking hour of those four years.

I get it, the difference between those two would be night and day, but I'm just trying to communicate the extreme range that is possible. Maybe we could standardize it and add up the cumulative days one spent in projects and then that would be finally comparable?

I'm off on a tangent.

How do we communicate great full-stack skills?

Going through a project description is great but average web development is nothing mindblowing. The best I can do is geek out about a certain database optimization or caching magic I did and that's it. But I'm off on a tangent.

I see good full-stack engineering as a series of design decisions that isn't dogmatic; most of the time you end up following convention, but there's times where you can often "downgrade" to something less due to your requirements.

Take modern full-stack web apps for example.

You can create every website with a Next.js boilerplate, Prisma for DB, and a fleet of micropackages. That's certainly the flavour of the decade. But if you don't need a backend, why run all of that when you can serve a static site like Vite, Astro, or even pure HTML/CSS/JS hitting a tiny FastAPI server?

I’m not making sweeping claims about convention. I haven't seen everything and maybe this is what senior web developers already know. But I've noticed a lot of small apps are more complicated than they need to be.

I thought that Systems Design interviews were all about this. That is not the case. Systems interviews often default to “design twitter” or “scale a URL shortener” which funnily enough becomes just another convention. You’re judged not on how you think, but how closely you can echo a pattern seen on YouTube. The diagrams are as performative as leetcode. Nobody asks if your design actually fits your goals; just whether you added a CDN and caching layer before someone else pointed it out.

Perhaps what all of this sums up to is that I'm asking for a way to convey my skills in full-stack development. For a chance to show how I think through problems. For a chance to not just list the stack that I used and call it a day.

Where are all of the good systems design interviews?