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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • You will lose the best candidates with an onerous coding challenge.

    Our process, which has been heavily influenced by debate on r/experiencedevs on reddit involves a short phone screen, a 30 MINUTE coding challenge, a tech interview consisting of pair programming, and a non-tech interview with management. Very light.

    The coding challenge is a FILTER only. It’s not to evaluate who to hire, but instead it’s to filter who not to continue interviewing.

    You learn a lot during pair programming in a short period of time, including personality and team fit. We let them drive and we just watch and discuss. The assignment is to fix a bug, and refactor the code the caused the bug.


  • Zero downtime deployments can get very complex for heavy usage apps, such as blue-green deployment.

    We decided to avoid the complexity with some practical workarounds.

    • Most deployments happen at 4am. “develop” branch merges deploy at 4am, and “master” branch merges deploy immediately.
    • We force browser refresh if the front end detects the back end has had breaking changes. We attempt to re-populate form field values.
    • During database migrations, we send 503 with Retry-After header in response to POSTs. Our client code knows to wait for that time and try again. If the time is too long, the user gets a friendly message that it will try again in X seconds. GETs are handled by an available read-replica, if possible.