Tell me about a challenging situation you encountered during a technical project and how you resolved it.

Structure your answer using the STAR Method (Situation, Task, Action, Result):

• Situation: In our final-year capstone project (a real-time campus event booking platform), our Node.js and SQLite backend encountered severe database lock latency during peak mock traffic simulations with 500 concurrent users.
• Task: As the backend lead, my objective was to eliminate timeout errors, lower response latency under 200ms, and maintain data consistency without migrating to a complex distributed cluster.
• Action: I profiled queries, enabled SQLite WAL (Write-Ahead Logging) mode to allow simultaneous reads while writing, created indexes on query lookup columns (slug, user_id), and introduced an in-memory caching layer for static event listings.
• Result: Response latency dropped by 78%, concurrency test passed with zero 500 errors across 1,000 simulated users, and our team ea ed the department's Outstanding Project distinction.