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CoderPad
- zachlatta 13y agoNeat website! One quick thing - the Ruby 1.8.7 REPL on the homepage was a bit of a turn-off because that Ruby version was recently discontinued. I'm not sure if any newer versions of Ruby have been compiled down to Javascript yet though.
- DanWaterworth 13y ago"Note that we are not using Ruby 1.9.x due to its reliance on threads, which cannot be ported directly using Emscripten." - https://github.com/replit/emscripted-ruby https://github.com/replit/emscripted-ruby
- akanet 13y agoHey, I made CoderPad. I'm looking at replacements for emscripted-ruby currently. Interesting candidates currently include doing it all server side, and using mruby compiled via emscripten. Unfortunately mruby's greatest current shortfall is lack of `require` support, which may or may not be a dealbreaker. What do you think?
- judofyr 13y agomruby is a completely different beast from Ruby. Consider it a different language, not a different version. What about using JRuby on the server-side?
- akanet 13y agoI've thought about it. The daunting bits are the trickiness around how long the session should live. You'd like the repl's variables to persist between commands, etc, but at the same time letting an arbitrary code session live for a long time on your server is probably not the safest thing. If you have any resources on the topic, I would love to look at them.
- DanWaterworth 13y agoI think the emscripten threads problem will eventually get fixed. In the mean time, I don't think there's a huge problem with using 1.8.7, but you might be able to improve it using the backports gem [1]. [1] https://github.com/marcandre/backports https://github.com/marcandre/backports
- akanet 13y agoCool, it's nice to see one of my projects make the rounds again. CoderPad has gone from frustrating "I can't believe no one's built this yet, interviews are so annoying" to a thing actual people are paying me for, and I have HN to thank for a lot of that early traffic. If anyone here has any questions about CoderPad, please feel to ask here, or if it looks like this topic's dropping off the frontpage, I'm always available at me@vincentwoo.com.
- bwb 13y agoVery cool idea! nice work!
- FreshCode 13y agoSo glad someone built this! Well done.
- consta 13y agoCool stuff, I have been looking for something similar for quite some time.
- jamesrcole 13y agoJust as some hopefully useful feedback, I found "If CoderPad prevents you from bringing in even one on-site candidate that you wouldn’t hire, it pays for itself immediately in time saved" difficult to parse. Is it trying to highlight that you don't have to physically bring someone in, or that it's better for evaluating people, or both? The double-negative along with the 'even one' seems to contribute to the issue. Also, saying "If CoderPad prevents you" sounds a bit too negative to me.
- nathanstitt 13y agothis. I came here to point that out. How about something like: CoderPad allows you to instantly evaluate a candidate's abilities without paying for an expensive on-site interview.
- rabidonrails 13y ago
- ID_10T 13y agoNice site, but please capitalize the first word of each bullet point. It looks unprofessional. http://oi44.tinypic.com/amqgqw.jpg http://oi44.tinypic.com/amqgqw.jpg
- akanet 13y agoGood point. I'll do it now.
- C1D 13y agoThis seems great and something like I would use but the only problem is that it doesn't work on my ipad and I use my ipad, allot.
- akanet 13y agoI'm going to take some time this week or the next to flesh out tablet functionality. If you drop me a line via email, I can let you know when it's ready.
- mmorett 13y agoGoing out on a limb here, but I'll assume this is for Ruby only? Nothing in the landing page suggests this works for other languages. I like the implementation, but if folks didn't like the NSA spying on them, they might not like this. This is wiretapping on steroids. I'm assuming the interviewer watches every keystroke. Creepy. I'm sure authors, well spoken and in full command of the English language, would get annoyed at someone staring at them to see if they can write a novel. Tech interviewing is broken, but all solutions historically point to trying to watch a person code. I don't think that's the solution. When folks realistically work on multiple tech stacks with multiple frameworks and multiple languages, what is to be gained by zeroing in (deeply) on only one aspect of it. This explains the need for a tech interview "study guide" posted earlier in the day. You're working on stuff contextually needed for your current job, but you'll be tested on stuff you don't use daily/monthly/yearly? That's insane.
- akanet 13y agoSorry if it isn't super highlighted, but if you scroll down a bit, you'll see that I support most languages you'd want to use this for (current notable exceptions are Go and Obj-C, the former of which is coming soon). Here's the list: c, c#, c++, clojure, coffeescript, haskell, java, javascript, lua, php, python, ruby, scala, scheme As for your philosophical objection, I think the true value prop of CoderPad is a bit more nuanced than you make it seem, respectfully. The primary benefits as I see them are twofold: 1. The right kind of candidate is wowed. It is a real fish landing back in the ocean moment. "Finally, this works like I've always dreamed it should." You look really sexy administering that interview. 2. It can help you see candidates who have a firm grasp of programming but not quite a great hold on syntax do better. I would argue the former is more important, and CoderPad let's you see them experiment with syntax without having to rack their brains over whether the parameter goes before "do" in ruby.
- epaga 13y agoI do think it could be highlighted better that other languages are supported. I almost didn't sign up because I thought it was Ruby only after the tutorial. It would obviously be ideal to have a demo for each language you support, but even if you simply highlight a bit clearer which languages you support right in the top part of the page rather than as a bullet point further down, that should really help your conversion rate.
- tobiasbischoff 13y agoAwesome what you can pull off in SaaS. $200 Bucks a month and still no unlimited use.
- ChrisLTD 13y agoIt's likely a bargain if you end up using a lot of support hours.
- wldlyinaccurate 13y agoThis is really great. A friend and I were going to start building something like this, mostly because we were like "why the hell does something like this not exist already"?
- akanet 13y agoThose words are almost literally the gripe to my coworkers that spawned this whole thing.
- _delirium 13y agoI was wondering how all this could work in a browser, and to my surprise it appears there's a pretty well-developed project that has a bunch of language interpreters working in the browser via Emscripten (discovered via viewing coderpad.io's source): http://replit.github.io/jsrepl/ http://replit.github.io/jsrepl/ It appears to have been developed by/for http://repl.it/ http://repl.it/, which is education- rather than interview-oriented.
- akanet 13y agoRepl.it is really quite great. Unfortunately it is beginning to feel its age (2 years, now). I'm looking to get off of it for some of the core languages I support, and I already rely on other services for the other, trickier languages (C++, java et al).
- xianshou 13y agoLooks wonderful, and far better than just copying the code from a hackpad into ideone. Unfortunately, the real thief of time here is the phone screen itself - although what would have gone on an online collaborative editor now goes in a REPL, the interviewer still has to shepherd the 8 of 10 candidates who can't write Fibonacci. And out of generosity or fear of giving offense, they'll likely sit through it all. (Which is the beginning of a fascinating discussion about choosing between the Scylla of wasted eng time and the Charybdis of a rigid, non-adaptive auto-screening, but that's for another comment.) As far as the env itself goes, though, props++.
- akanet 13y agoI do appreciate Greek myth. Allow me to respond in kind. Athena is said to have emerged fully formed and fully armored from her interviewer's head, but what her peer reviewers did not see at the time was the struggle she faced in Zeus' ego. Though newly born, she yearned to wrest the tools of code to her will, yet no matter how she strained at the yoke of her keyboard, she could never quite overcome the compiler. One day, she happened upon a memento that belonged to Metis. It was CoderPad, and it allowed her to more fully bring her will into reality. Using it, she forged herself a suit of armor - not her best work, but much better than the patchwork stuff she was making before. She banged and clamored with her shield, and eventually, the hiring manager Hephaestus was finally brought around to overrule's the stubborn Zeus' "no hire."
- FreshCode 13y agoWould be nice if I could try out all the languages in the local session, just to drop any remaining objections.
- akanet 13y agoThis is coming - I've been swamped. Hear you loud and clear though.
- wasd 13y agoFor further discussion, check this previous posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5707525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5707525 Glad to see you took some of my copy write advice from last time :) If you don't mind me asking, how many users do you have?
- akanet 13y agoNot very many by internet startup standards, but the ones I do have are very engaged. Thank you for your advice from last time, it was very helpful.
- jmickey 13y agoI recently used http://thereq.com/ http://thereq.com/ for a similar purpose. Features I liked: * I can set interview questions in various languages * Candidate can write code right away, I can see everything he/she writes * Code can be executed to see the result right away * This even works for SQL, they have a sample schema the candidate can manipulate * They have a fairly large library of questions you can just add to your interviews * It's completely free as far as I can tell No affiliation with the site, but it was very useful for me.
- filereaper 13y agoVery cool and immediately useful. Might want to go over the "flow" of how the application will be used? I'm guessing the interviewer will set up the "pad" and just send a URL to the interviewee?
- akanet 13y agoYup! Updated copy for the landing page is coming down the pipe. I should really make that bit explicit.