1.16Interview framing

"I approach data verification by never trusting the UI or API response alone. After any state-changing operation, I write a SELECT query against the database to confirm persistence, check that defaults were applied, and validate timestamps. I optimize for specificity -- explicit column lists rather than SELECT *, parameterized queries rather than string interpolation. The trade-off is that database tests are tightly coupled to the schema, so I keep them resilient by listing only the columns I need and using DictCursor for readable assertions."