CodeRev

Try CodeRev.app for your interviews -- it's free!

coderev.mp4

CodeRev is a lightweight tool to help you organize and conduct technical interviews using code reviews rather than leetcode.

Rationale

In the age of StackOverflow and ChatGPT, is leetcode really the best way to evaluate technical candidates?

Was it ever?

Code review as interview has many benefits for any engineering team:

• Understand how candidates interact with isolated parts of your codebase.
• Better reflects day-to-day engineering responsibilities in your team.
• Realistic representation of how a candidate thinks and communicates.
• Open-ended and collaborative; no black and white responses.

How it works

1. Create a workspace for each of the roles you're screening for.
2. Upload and edit your source files that you'd like the candidates to review.
3. Add candidates; each gets a separate view of the source to work on.
4. Candidates review the code in their workspace and provide comments and feedback.

Benefits:

Why use CodeRev? Why not just a GitHub repo?

1. Easy setup: Lightweight, focused, and simple; just a few clicks to get started.
2. Isolated: No exposure of your internal GitHub repos, accounts, and workspaces.
3. Collaborative: Review candidate responses with your team and leave your own notes. (Coming soon)
4. Easy to compare: See feedback from different candidates to the same code to compare. (Coming soon)
5. Define timed access: Automatically release the workspace to your candidate and optionally revoke it. (Coming soon)

FAQ:

• Why did you make this tool? I went through an interview where the process involved reviewing a snippet of code and really enjoyed the experience. I thought it would be great if there was a dedicated tool for this.
• What's the stack Nuxt3 (Vue.js) + Quasar Framework + Google Cloud Firebase. Productive, fast, and more or less free.

Development

Development can be done locally using the Firebase CLI emulators.

1. Install the Firebase CLI tooling for your platform: https://firebase.google.com/docs/cli
2. Make a copy of web/env.template as web/.env and add your Firebase config.
3. Start the backend
4. Start the frontend

# Start the emulators in on console
cd web
yarn # Restore
yarn dev

# Start the backend
firebase emulators:start --only auth,firestore,functions,hosting,storage \
  --import .data/firebase --export-on-exit

Deploying

You'll need a Firebase project to deploy:

# From web:
yarn generate     # This will generate the static routes.

# From the root:
firebase deploy

# Deploy only the hosting (making a front-end change):
firebase deploy --only hosting

💡 Note: Functions isn't necessary; I started the project thinking I may need it, but you can ignore it and remove it. You won't be charged for it either way if you deploy it with functions.

Using Functions Framework

Functions framework allows the SSR backend to run on the server. However, this is currently not needed for CodeRev.

To enable, swap the hosting configuration:

"source": "web",
"ignore": [
  "firebase.json",
  "**/.*",
  "**/node_modules/**"
],
"frameworksBackend": {
  "region": "us-central1"
}

Setting up CORS for Storage

Storage requires that you set up CORS when using a custom domain.

Create the bucket source.coderev.app and then follow this guide: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/using-cors

Instead of doing it from the command line, you can use the Cloud Shell in console and open an editor in browser.

Create a file cors.json

[
  {
    "origin": ["https://coderev.app"],
    "method": ["GET"],
    "responseHeader":[
        "Access-Control-Allow-Origin"
      ],
    "maxAgeSeconds": 3600
  }
]

From the console, run:

gcloud storage buckets update gs://source.coderev.app --cors-file=cors.json