Latency budget court begins with a gavel sound played from a battered Bluetooth speaker—cheesy but effective. Teams draw slips assigning prosecution or defense for a microservice accused of stealing milliseconds from checkout.
Opening statements must clock under three minutes. We ban slides; props only. Successful teams anchor on customer-visible symptoms, not flame graphs, until minute two. The third minute names a remediation poem: a plain-language commitment with rhythm, not rhyme.
Cross-examination is where charts mislead. Mentors teach cohorts to ask whether the visualization’s baseline matches the story told in opening statements. If not, the chart is stricken. Closing arguments return to the remediation poem, now edited. Winners buy iced coffee for losers—actual rule, actually followed once.