jurajmasar

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | Europe remote in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart: CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We are engineers, making the tools we always wanted. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

Apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

How we operate:

- https://betterstack.com/careers

- https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

- https://juraj.blog

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | Europe remote in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We are engineers, making the tools we always wanted. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

Apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

How we operate:

- https://betterstack.com/careers

- https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

- https://juraj.blog

Hey Hacker News

I’m Juraj, Co-Founder & CEO of Better Stack — I designed this interview process so let me share why I think a PHP project is a good idea when interviewing for a full-stack position where you work mostly in Rails.

First, please understand how we operate.

We’re a small group of full-stack engineers. By ‘full-stack’ I mean that our engineers build products from the ground up end-to-end. There’s no artificial boundary between ‘backend engineers’ and ‘frontend engineers’, ‘database engineers’, and ‘SREs’, etc.

This means we move very fast. There are almost no meetings. No ‘sprint planning sessions’. No brainstorming. No need to ask for a permission from a different team to agree on a common API before you start implementing. You can get to flow, play your favorite music, write code and deploy the feature the same day.

We typically work with very senior people, many ex CTOs and VPs of Engineering. The idea is to have tiny teams of super experienced people.

If you love hacking on side-projects and writing software, you’d typically like it here.

…

Now, why do we ask you to implement a feature into a terrible PHP code from 10 years as a part of our interviews?

Multiple reasons.

A) To test your pain threshold.

Is 4 hours of PHP too painful? Then it’s probably better if you don’t continue in the interview process as you probably wouldn’t enjoy working here.

If 4 hours of PHP is too painful, you’d resign from the job the moment I’d ask you to implement a Terraform provider; or a data transformation function in VRL; or a wasm-compiled function in AssemblyScript or debug a conntrack issue at 3am during a downtime.

I had Rails engineer refusing to write a Dockerfile, “because it’s some else’s job to deploy the code”. That approach unfortunately doesn’t work with us. And if you do only want to write JavaScript and touch no other technology, that’s ok! Please just find a different company that works like that.

B) I consider PHP + JavaScript general knowledge.

One half of our engineers didn’t work with Rails before starting at Better Stack.

We don’t screen for Rails. We don’t screen for any single technology, in fact. We screen for general knowledge about developing software. The best engineers can pick up any reasonable technology quickly.

I want to work with you if you’re able to implement the test project and deploy it in an afternoon even with a technology you never worked with.

Great engineers who never worked with PHP successfully did this years ago. These days it’s even easier since we have Claude, Cursor, GPT o1.

C) Can you write software without modern frameworks? Do you understand how stuff works under the hood?

The task itself is so simple yet so many people mess up very basic things. I obviously can’t share our evaluation check list, but I can tell you that 50% of submitted projects are vulnerable to XSS, for example.

Do you blindly rely on the latest frameworks, hosted databases and PaaS to build your applications; do you rely on your teammates to catch your mistakes in a PR review and a different team of SREs to deploy your code to production? Or do you truly understand how things work under the hood? Are you going to actually test the page’s mobile responsiveness when you implement a UI? Would you implement the very basic best practices of UI usability or you don’t care about usability at all as long as the data gets saved in the database?

D) We test your personality.

Startups are typically a high-pressure environment.

How will you act if you disagree with me/your colleagues? We treasure the atmosphere at the company. We don’t work with brilliant jerks.

Some candidates simply politely reply: “Would it be ok if I implement it in Rails and Tailwind from scratch instead?” We say ‘Sure!’ and if the project is good we extend them an offer.

Some people start attacking us with aggressive responses. That’s a self-selection.

E) When do you consider the project being ‘done’?

What does production-ready mean to you? Some folks never shipped a production software on their own.

There’s no other person checking your work at Better Stack before it goes live. You can design, develop and deploy to production on your own. Will you ship good stuff or half-baked products? Will you ship secure features or introduce a security vulnerability?

The project is intentionally vaguely defined so that we see what you consider being ‘done’.

F) This is a paid project.

I don’t expect you to work for free. We kindly ask you to name your rate and issue us an invoice and we pay what you ask for even when we reject you. That sounds fair to me.

…

A good interview process is a glimpse into what the actual work is like. Interview process is not supposed to be pleasurable to all candidates.

So if you don’t like the process, the tasks or the interviewers — that’s alright! I want to sincerely thank you for investing your time into the process and giving it a shot, but it’d be better if you worked somewhere else. That’s what a good interview process does.

We do our best to be nice. To run a fast process. To explain why we do things the way we do them. To pay you for the assignment we ask you to implement at home. In F2F, if you don’t know an answer to a question we aim to educate and explain. We always ask for feedback.

And we do make many mistakes along the way, too — the company is growing fast and “when you chop wood, splinters fly.” So I apologize if you interviewed with us and had a bad experience.

Interviews are an approximation game: we try to guess if you’d enjoy working with us in a very limited amount of time.

I can’t win a popular vote here as we give offers to <1% of candidates. But I’m always delighted when a rejected candidate replies to our feedback email saying they learned a lot during the process and/or re-apply after a year.

The truth is that many software engineers would probably never enjoy working at a startup. Big tech and a fast growing startup is a very different environment. And that’s completely ok! Everyone is not meant to be working at startups. But self-awareness is key.

I wrote more about how we work here (https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering) and here (https://juraj.blog/p/100x-software-engineering). I plan on writing a series of blog posts explaining why run the rest of the interview process the way we do.

Thanks for reading and all the best!

Juraj

http://betterstack.com/careers

https://juraj.blog

https://linkedin.com/in/jurajmasar/

http://twitter.com/jurajmasar

P.S. Use Better Stack for your next project! https://betterstack.com

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | Europe in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart: CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We are engineers, making the tools we always wanted. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

- https://betterstack.com/careers

- https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

- https://juraj.blog

apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | Europe in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We're helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

- https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

- https://juraj.blog

- apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU or remote in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart: CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We're helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

https://juraj.blog

apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU or remote in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We're helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

- https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

- https://juraj.blog

- apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We're helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

- https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

- https://juraj.blog

apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We're helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

- https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

- https://juraj.blog

apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

Better Stack offers heartbeat monitoring for free, here's the docs: https://betterstack.com/docs/uptime/cron-and-heartbeat-monit...

Disclaimer: I'm the founder

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU or remote in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too. We're helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

https://juraj.blog

apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

Very cool!

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU or remote in UTC ± 3h We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We're helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

https://juraj.blog

Apply at https://betterstack.com/careers/fullstack-engineer

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU or remote in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We’re helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you’re at the right address.

How we operate:

https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

https://juraj.blog

email us at [email protected]

it's simple. convention over configuration. there's a lot to like

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU or remote in UTC ± 3h

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We’re helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you’re at the right address.

How we operate:

https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

https://juraj.blog

email us at [email protected]

Better Stack | https://betterstack.com | /^(Full-?stack|Frontend) Engineer$/i | EU or remote

We are software builders at :heart:

CEO is a software engineer, COO is a software engineer and you guessed it; CTO is an engineer, too.

We're helping developers in building a better internet. If you love building amazing software, you're at the right address.

How we operate:

https://betterstack.com/careers/engineering

https://juraj.blog

email me at [email protected]

I tried a bunch of the GPT extensions, Voila is by far the most elegant

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of https://logtail.com, ClickHouse-based hosted log management platform.

PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, and ClickHouse are all impressive pieces of software. We use both PostgreSQL and ClickHouse at Logtail.

ClickHouse shines for true OLAP use-cases and is very hard to beat performance-wise when configured properly.

Example:

> Poor inserts and much higher disk usage (e.g., 2.7x higher disk usage than TimescaleDB) at small batch sizes (e.g., 100-300 rows/batch).

If your consistency requirements allow, you could use the Buffer Table Engine to get blazing fast inserts: https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/engines/table-engines/special...

Horizontal scalability and compression are also unbeatable from what I've seen, to name a few.

There's a hefty price tag, however: ClickHouse is quite ops heavy and its observability has a seriously steep learning curve. Only go for ClickHouse in production if you really know what you're doing :)

Agreed!

> Ubers Clickhouse as a Log Storage thing

We built hosted ClickHouse-based logging as a service https://logtail.com, just launched with Show HN last week.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder, happy to answer any questions

Thank you, Equiet! I'll share it with the team here. It means a lot!

Thanks Redsquare, appreciate it!

Full disclosure: I'm the CEO of BetterUptime.com.

One thing you can do is to properly configure your monitoring software.

1. Pick the right alert sensitivity + notification channel: If your app is well-built and never goes down, 30 second checks and getting alerted after the very first failed request works well. However, if another legacy app is unreliable and often goes down for ~5 minutes when making DB backups, configure your monitoring so that you only get alerted when the legacy service goes down for at least 10 minutes.

2. Get phone calls for high urgent alerts (e.g. homepage is down)

3. Push notification/Slack message for low urgency alerts (e.g. background processing queue has too many tasks enqueued). If you're at a dinner with friends and you get a low-urgency alert you can just ignore it.

4. Don't take it too seriously! Odds are it's not a life/death situation when your app goes down. Downtime happens to everyone!

5. Pick a reliable uptime monitoring provider so that you never get a false incident at 4am in the morning (shameless plug! :)

Seems like a significant portion of the capital is coming from Asia, mainly South Korea, with just Bithumb BTC/KRW trades making almost 11% of today's volume.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#markets

The basic functionality is free, certain advanced features are paid.