You have likely just made a request to schedule a technical interview with an engineer from our team. These instructions are meant to help you set up your environment and get you ready for success in this next step in the vetting process. AFTER you finish setting up your environment, you'll be ready to participate in the interview.
A pair session is a collaborative, live coding session where two or more engineers will take turns writing code. We use various tools and techniques to make distributed coding and collaboration possible including screen sharing and an online IDE tuned for collaboration.
We want to use the entire time alotted for the interview for actual coding. To that end, we ask that you set up an environment and save the setup to git before you attend the interview with our engineering team. This extra step prevents false-starts and ensures every candidate gets a fair shake at demonstrating their dev powers.
- Unless the programming language/technology was chosen by the hiring manager, you should decide on a language in which you would like to use during this interview. We suggest you choose the language in which you feel most comfortable.
- Create a new PUBLIC git repository at github for your environment and the code we will write together (we will ask for the url later).
- Set up a dev environment for your language in GitPod. We use GitPod since it allows us to spin up collaborative dev environments for multiple languages. If your chosen language is not supported by GitPod or you are unable to get it set up, please let your hiring manager know or choose another language.
- Use GitPod to open and configure your git repo and workspace for your selected language. We suggest saving the GitPod config to a yml file in your repo so that the environment can be started easily when it's time for the pair session. During the pair session, we will be writing unit tests that interact with functions in your codebase. Keeping this in mind, your workspace config can be fairly minimal.
- Set up your repo for unit testing by adding some dummy code that demonstates basic unit testing. If you have never done unit testing, we suggest you do a bit of research.
- You'll need two unit tests that interact with implementatoin code:
- One unit test that FAILS for the right reasons
- One unit test that PASSES for the right reasons
- You'll need a way to run the unit tests, whether from the command line or using built-in GitPod tools
- Enable auto-save so that all viewers can see updates in almost-real-time.
Once you are done with the last step, you're ready to attend the technical interview! Congrats!
GitPod allows you to share your workspace with others for live collaboration. We will want to share your workspace during the technical interview, so please be ready. Here's a video that should help you share your workspace url during the interview. https://www.loom.com/share/ddc80cfd36754749b6c59352f56e8831