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Yikes, I love Kagi but if I'd applied for this position and they gave me this assignment, I'd have told them to take a hike. This isn't an afternoon project, it

Yikes, I love Kagi but if I'd applied for this position and they gave me this assignment, I'd have told them to take a hike. This isn't an afternoon project, it's a full weekend. Maybe two. And are you supposed to be writing tests and stuff for this? Moreover, this exercise tells you so little about the candidate and their experience. Sure, you know they can code (or did they just use Cursor?) but you have no idea whether they are good and addressing prompts and not at making wise choices. Who cares if the program can send email? What matters is that the client doesn't choke after 10k messages are received or that unicode is handled well: that's the sort of actual challenges you'd be doing at a company like Kagi, not making enormous toy projects. Edit: Despite that, it seems like a bold choice for the author to build a web app instead of a TUI like the instructions lay out. One could say "terminal inspired" could include web applications but I think that's a stretch.

Tiberium 1y ago
To be fair, they do explicitly say "build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client" and then "Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app" below, so even if it's a web app, they expected it to be terminal inspired, especially from the next paragraph in "Inspiration": > Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.
theamk 1y ago
You can totally do terminal-inspired web app - http://www.coboloncogs.org/ http://www.coboloncogs.org/ is an extreme example, but for this assignment, even fixed-width font and compact layout would likely be enough. Of course the OP in this post did nothing even close to that.
- nbittich 1y ago
  I did someting like this for a hobby project of mine: https:/nbittich.github.io/adana/
- josecodea 1y ago
  > even fixed-width font and compact layout would likely be enough Your assumption is that a better font-choice and some CSS would have made the difference for a back-end role.
  - theamk 1y ago
    No, my assumption is that actually reading and following the requirements would increase the chance of the interview. It's like that Van Halen brown M&M Story - something that is simple to implement, but shows that the candidate actually read the requirements. Because after all, who wants to work with a person who just ignores half of the requirements they were given? While we are talking, I was actually always wondered about candidate responses like that... There is that spec, which starts with "minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and contains specific references to the products you want to imitate. Line 3 even explicitly says "Can use a fake backend", and to me, this shows pretty clearly that they don't care about backend, they need UI. And then there is your submissions which basically has no UI to speak of. It's not even "minimal", as the basic features (like new mail indicator) are missing. Also, in no possible world you can call this "terminal inspired", it's 100% generic web app. How on earth did you expect this submission to work, given the assignment they sent you? Did you just skip over the original page and then forgot about it immediately? Or did you read it, decided that "terminal-inspired web pages cannot possibly exist" and proceeded to implement completely different thing? In that case, why didn't you mention this in email ("and btw, I am going to ignore the part where you said I should build terminal-inspired email client because I think it's stupid.") Or maybe you read the requirements, and randomly declared half of them "useless fluff" and decided not to implement them? What was your thought process?

Tiberium 1y ago

To be fair, they do explicitly say "build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client" and then "Email client can either be in the terminal (i.e. a TUI) or a web app" below, so even if it's a web app, they expected it to be terminal inspired, especially from the next paragraph in "Inspiration": > Your implementation should take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.

theamk 1y ago

You can totally do terminal-inspired web app - http://www.coboloncogs.org/ http://www.coboloncogs.org/ is an extreme example, but for this assignment, even fixed-width font and compact layout would likely be enough. Of course the OP in this post did nothing even close to that.

nbittich 1y ago
I did someting like this for a hobby project of mine: https:/nbittich.github.io/adana/
josecodea 1y ago
> even fixed-width font and compact layout would likely be enough Your assumption is that a better font-choice and some CSS would have made the difference for a back-end role.
- theamk 1y ago
  No, my assumption is that actually reading and following the requirements would increase the chance of the interview. It's like that Van Halen brown M&M Story - something that is simple to implement, but shows that the candidate actually read the requirements. Because after all, who wants to work with a person who just ignores half of the requirements they were given? While we are talking, I was actually always wondered about candidate responses like that... There is that spec, which starts with "minimal, terminal-inspired email client", and contains specific references to the products you want to imitate. Line 3 even explicitly says "Can use a fake backend", and to me, this shows pretty clearly that they don't care about backend, they need UI. And then there is your submissions which basically has no UI to speak of. It's not even "minimal", as the basic features (like new mail indicator) are missing. Also, in no possible world you can call this "terminal inspired", it's 100% generic web app. How on earth did you expect this submission to work, given the assignment they sent you? Did you just skip over the original page and then forgot about it immediately? Or did you read it, decided that "terminal-inspired web pages cannot possibly exist" and proceeded to implement completely different thing? In that case, why didn't you mention this in email ("and btw, I am going to ignore the part where you said I should build terminal-inspired email client because I think it's stupid.") Or maybe you read the requirements, and randomly declared half of them "useless fluff" and decided not to implement them? What was your thought process?