It was installing a well-known blogging platform. Something the team had already done before, and sounded simple, only turning into something gnarly. The trouble started with the host running on Debian, with Apache (without mod_php), so now you got a choice of fastcgi or try to force Docker on there … there are no docs for that weird combination.

You only have 30 mins. No one had ever completed it in that time, and finishing it in 30 mins was not the point. The observer can take in all sorts of things, from ability to problem solve, to how one handles the time pressure.

The point isn’t this specific combination of tech (it does not have to be a blog or an installation task), but that someone in devops will run into obscure things as a matter of course.