
CoderPad – Interviewing Platform for Programmers - NicoJuicy
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/coderpad
======
brandonhsiao
CoderPad is _really, really good._ I've interviewed using a bunch of
alternatives, and CoderPad is far and away the only one that works reliably
all the time. It always cheers me up when a company tells me they're using it,
because I know it won't lag, the vi keybindings will work, the built-in
terminal will work, there won't be weird interface glitches, every language I
need will be there, etc.

This sounds hyperbolic, but I've never wanted a feature during an interview
and found CoderPad to lack it.

~~~
gaius
_It always cheers me up when a company tells me they 're using it_

But how often in real life does a manager come to your desk and say, implement
this feature RIGHT NOW and by the way I'll be standing over your shoulder the
whole time? Would your first thought be, damn, I hope my key bindings work?

It doesn't matter how technically good a thing is if it shouldn't even be a
thing in the first place...

~~~
akanet
An interview isn't a surprise attack, they're usually scheduled days in
advance. Good interviewers will usually characterize what kind of questions
you can expect to receive ahead of time. I'm sorry that you've had bad
experiences during interviews, but the process is difficult for both parties.
It can be very difficult to assess both candidates and companies without
spending an inordinate amount of time in the process. CoderPad offers a
particular cost-benefit tradeoff, and longer take-home assignments offer
another. Onsite projects offer yet another, etc.

------
noobhacker
Vincent says that building a solo business requires you to work on a boring
idea, i.e. something everyone already knows the value proposition of, e.g.
punch card on computer.

How does one learn about these "mundane" issues that small business owners
face? The examples I've seen from Vincent / Patrick McKenzie (patio11) are
happenstance (e.g. I happen to hang out in this community, so I know). Like
many of us here, I'm an engineer in a tech company and does not naturally have
small business owners in my circle.

So what's an efficient way to reach out and understand small businesses'
problems? Online forums (which one?), local business associations?

~~~
econner
The best problems to solve are the ones you experience on a day to day basis,
that you are personally invested in. That's what Vincent did here. It's much
harder to build for other people because it requires a lot of user research &
constant feedback & it's often difficult to even get honest feedback. The
trick is recognizing a problem as worthwhile to solve.

Here are a couple of ideas from my day-to-day as a programmer:

\- Code review reminder tool. Code reviews are great but there can be social
friction to getting them done. I think the typical way this works is to @
mention someone which sends them an email & then ping them on slack if they
don't review it w/in a certain amount of time, but I always feel at least a
little bad about pinging someone on slack.

\- Better software to sync local files to servers for development. A lot of
devs run linux machines on aws, develop code locally, and then somehow sync
their code from local to the dev server. I feel like people often just write
their own scripts that amount to using rsync and some kind of system event
watcher for file changes.

\- More complex reminders. I want task and date specific reminders. So, for
example, remembering to buy someone a gift for their birthday. I want the
first reminder 3 weeks before and then a reminder everyday until I resolve.

I dunno if any of these ideas are worth solving though. I don't know if I'd
pay for them..but they are things I want.

~~~
fragmede
Focusing on your own day-to-day problems ends up with the various VC-funded
"mom apps" to summon contractors who to come to your house, pick up your room,
and do your laundry for you, make that statement old advice and not to be
taken literally.

I agree that more complex reminders with the features you describe would be
quite cool, for both code reviews and birthdays would be cool, but you admit
that the business case isn't quite there yet. (There is a glut of reminder
apps on the app store, those features probably exist between all of them.)

Better sync software falls under the category of development tools; even
Visual Studio is free these days (in the form of VS Code) because selling to
developers is notoriously difficult to sell software to, because they know how
to code. (There is also no shortage of open source inotify+rsync based sync
tools.)

~~~
econner
I suppose it's also about broadening your own horizons so the space of
problems that apply to you is a little wider than "mom apps".

Fwiw, it's also a lot easier to hate on every idea than to believe in it :-D.
I'm the first to be pessimistic, but I learned that you have to try something
& iterate on it even if all you can do is find fault with every idea.

These were also ideas I came up with in like 5 mins. Just showing that ideas
are a dime a dozen and it takes exploration to actually find something that
works.

------
alexwebb2
This is actually a fantastic interview and I'm surprised it isn't higher up.

I remember first encountering CoderPad a few years ago and being immediately
sold on it as a development hiring manager. It's an excellent product and I'm
not at all surprised to see it achieve such success.

I actually ended up finding a security issue in it back then, and Vincent had
it resolved within two hours of me reporting it, which I was extremely
impressed with.

------
urlgrey
Two years ago I integrated CoderPad into a technical-screening-as-a-service
product I was involved with; Vincent's responsiveness and focus were very
impressive. I'm thrilled to see him making such progress!

In the event that someone else is looking to integrate CoderPad into their
product, here's the Java client library I wrote for CoderPad in 2015:
[https://github.com/skidder/coderpad-java-
api](https://github.com/skidder/coderpad-java-api)

~~~
akanet
Haha you worked with Buzz! Your work's great but MAN those guys were really...
something, huh?

------
brianpgordon
> For instance, in CoderPad, there are a few ways to abuse our quota system to
> get more than you paid for. Clamping down on this would require making the
> product more annoying just to penalize bad customers. Every time someone
> tells me I should be more strict about this, I ask, "How much effort should
> we spend trying to extract value from people who clearly don't want to give
> it to us? Shouldn't we just try to attract better customers?"

This is actually pretty sneaky. It takes a long time for the corporate gears
to grind and get a contract signed. Meanwhile the engineers are finding the
product more and more indispensable because the product is fantastic and
there's not anything _really_ stopping them from going over the limit.
Eventually a signature is inevitable, even at the (to me) eye-popping price
point because everyone in the org loves it.

------
perfmode
Brings tears to my eyes to see a fellow engineer make it out of the corporate
ghetto.

~~~
fogetti
Haha! :D That's a funny way to put it. Very nice wording! :D

------
vvanders
> As the sole owner of my business, I can and do tell people to fuck off, and
> I treasure this privilege almost as much as life itself.

Standout quote from the article, also pretty awesome candor all around.

------
brianpgordon
Since Vincent is reading these comments-

This quote popped out at me from the interview:

> In general, we want CoderPad to mirror a modern development environment as
> closely as possible, and we jump through a lot of hoops to make that happen.

I'm curious about your thoughts on Floobits, which provides a shared buffer
using the developer's native IDE. If your goal is IDE parity then it seems
like they'll always have you beaten.

I think that as an interviewee I would prefer my familiar IDE. And as an
interviewer I want my interviewee to be as comfortable as possible. I don't do
whiteboard coding, as it introduces a artificial barrier of difficulty that
interferes with my evaluation. I think the same argument applies to making the
candidate write Scala code without being able to determine the type of an
expression at a keypress or step through line-by-line in a debugger, or even
just to be unused the unfamiliar keymappings.

So what's your pitch for CoderPad in the face of Floobits? Reliability? Ease
of set-up? The replay over time feature in CoderPad is really neat for the
interviewer but I'd rather the candidate feel a bit more at ease than to have
that feature.

BTW, love your product. We use it where I work! :)

~~~
akanet
Truthfully, I really just wanted to buy something instead of _making_
CoderPad. I imagine it's certainly possible for floobits, or atom teletype, or
something else entirely to get enough adoption to render our product mostly
useless. We're nowhere near there, but I wouldn't mind that happening. We'll
make something else or I'll switch careers.

~~~
8x8squares
Great work with CoderPad, Vincent!

Honest question from a newbie:

 _Why developing in node.js felt slow? What did ruby offer that node didn 't?_

~~~
akanet
Another user wrote a great answer to that in the original article comments:
[https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/coderpad-interviewing-
pla...](https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/coderpad-interviewing-platform-for-
programmers-170-000-mo-2b7fd0cd5f?commentId=-L-A9_QYDUEbOZw61t9O)

------
relix
A bit offtopic, but I wonder why he is of the opinion that devise is
“terrible”, and what he has since used instead.

~~~
akanet
It is very hard to extend in even small ways. I still use it, I just hate it.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
If you were picking today what will you use?

What did you find difficult to do in devise? In my experience extending it was
possible but the documentation was sparse and wiki can be confusing.

------
beager
Love CoderPad and I think Vincent does the SaaS thing very well. It’s a
product with a strong value proposition, a reasonable pricing model with free
tier to get you hooked, and puts enough features and attention to UX in to
stay valuable and ahead of competition. Furthermore, Vincent has done a good
job of judiciously injecting his personality into the marketing and
communications about the product, which shows he understands his market well.

If I ever aim to build a strong, low-overhead SaaS business, I would
definitely look to CoderPad for inspiration on execution.

------
rixed
I'm impressed with everlane, the company he was working for at the time he
implemented coderpad. Many companies, small or large, would have either
prevented him from doing so, or would have tried to claim his creation their
own property (with some credibility). Mmm, I just checked what their business
is and it seems to be totally unrelated to development, maybe that helped.

~~~
akanet
Everlane is a great place to work! There are lots of creative, interesting
people there making products that people actually want (clothes). If you're
interested in working there, I encourage you to apply:
[https://jobs.lever.co/everlane/2ea2ce6a-a85c-40e1-8504-c2d23...](https://jobs.lever.co/everlane/2ea2ce6a-a85c-40e1-8504-c2d231a63003).

No, I don't get a finder's fee.

------
arikrak
He and dhh (of Ruby on rails) should form a club or something. There's so much
buzz around startups but sometimes a business is the way the go. The issue is
even a small business is much more difficult to succeed at than a regular job
but it doesn't have the huge possible success of a startup..

~~~
blacksmythe
"The Worlds Biggest Conference For the Worlds Smallest Self-Funded Software
Companies" [http://www.microconf.com/](http://www.microconf.com/)

------
grsblk
I never do online tests, like with CoderPad. Why? The tests are flawed and
subjective. I can give any interviewer 1 assignment that will make him/her
fail miserably. Should I not do that first to see if the lead/manager is
competent? Of course not! We are stupid applicants/beggars! We are not allowed
to test our superiors for competence!

I cannot imagine the author of CoderPad would be happy to be in the position
of an applicant again having to do such a stupid test. He is only happy
because he now makes so much money of that process and never have to be an
applicant again. Well done, we less lucky devs are f __ __* anyways.

~~~
akanet
I did many interviews, and enjoyed most of them. I had some bad ones, which I
either failed or refused to do. Software devs are very highly paid
professionals and can afford to refuse opportunities with quite a bit of
discretion. I encourage you to continue refusing tests you find stupid or
poorly designed. We encourage our clients to ask fair, useful questions, but
the only way to change the world is to vote with your feet.

~~~
grsblk
> I had some bad ones, which I either failed or refused to do.

And that's the other reason I never do online tests. I don't know what the
company and for example CodePad will do with the data collected from me. Will
they store, sell and/or share it? Will CodePad reuse collected data in any way
if I do an interview for another company? Etc..

~~~
akanet
I sort of doubt this will change your course of action, but we of course do
not share your data. That said, any company that asks you an interview
question has probably seen hundreds of answers to said question already and
probably has neither the inclination nor ability to profit from somehow
collating your answers.

If anything, companies are much more concerned with candidates sharing
questions with each other.

~~~
grsblk
> but we of course do not share your data

There you go buddy:

"A record of everything the candidate types in the pad will be permanently
saved for your team to review and share afterwards."

[https://coderpad.io/getting-started-recruiters](https://coderpad.io/getting-
started-recruiters)

~~~
matt_kantor
Right, what you type is shared with the company interviewing you. Isn't that
kind of the point of the product? Isn't that true in whiteboard coding
interviews as well? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but getting worked up about
this sounds like being upset that GMail sends your messages to recipients'
mail servers.

I think akanet was clarifying that CoderPad doesn't share your data with any
_other_ companies.

If you're worried about the company you're interviewing with doing shady
things, I'd suggest interviewing somewhere else.

------
mangatmodi
Hackerrank is currently de-facto around me, any comparisons in them?

~~~
akanet
Hackerrank tends to offer a different cost-benefit tradeoff in interviewing -
less time invested on the part of the company, and more time invested by the
candidate. I don't particularly like this approach because I think higher-
skilled candidates are more likely to churn when given impersonal treatment.

------
dpiers
Vince, it sounds like things have come a long way since we had coffee back in
May 2013. Congrats on sticking with it and building a decent business.

------
steerpike
Something about the way this guy communicates reminds me of Maciej Ceglowski
of pinboard and idlewords.

------
b0rsuk
The terminal claims to work exactly like a native shell, but doesn't. Not with
Python3 anyway.

[i*i for i in range(20)]

displays each number on a newline. I tried in Firefox 45.9.0

~~~
akanet
We actually go a bit further in the interest of giving you more power -
CoderPad uses ipython for its Python repl. You can read more about it at
[https://CoderPad.io/languages#python](https://CoderPad.io/languages#python)

------
newusertoday
terrific! i was rooting for this guy ever since i watched the youtube video.
good to see that its successful in a tough market even though big players like
microsoft have added these features in their own offerings.

------
alinspired
can anybody share how coderpad is different from hackerrank ?

------
palerdot
The dot in the revenue needs to be removed. Looks like 170$ and misleading.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Done, in Dutch it's comma which is a seperator. Not the dot :)

