Code review as interview made easy.
CodeRev is a lightweight tool to help you organize and conduct technical interviews using code reviews rather than leetcode.
Is it free or "free"?
Yes, completely free. CodeRev is ad-free, has no up-sells, no pro plan, no premium subscriptions, no limitations, has no payment capture flow, and doesn't trade your data. Feel free to clone the repo and deploy your own!
Rationale
AI coding assistants like Copilot, Cursor, Aiden, and so on can help teams improve productivity and are quickly becoming mainstream tools.
But this also means that teams may want to explicitly evaluate candidates for how well they read code and identify issues with performance, security, and quality in AI generated code (or a team's existing code).
CodeRev makes it easy and frictionless for teams to incorporate code reviews into the interview process.
A candidate's ability to read and reason about existing code can be a better measure of how quickly they can adapt to a team and how a team would expect them to contribute to ongoing efforts. And in most cases, a new hire's first days are focused on reading code.
3 Features in 60 seconds
Benefits
Why use CodeRev? Why not just a GitHub repo or CodeSandbox or Stackblitz?
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.
Why not just CodeSandbox or Stackblitz?
Those tools serve a different purpose in an interview process. This tool is meant to help understand how a candidate would interact and communicate in a real-world, day-to-day responsibility of providing feedback to a teammate.
Do code reviews replace coding exercises?
It can if you want it to! But think of it as another tool you can use to help better gauge your candidates.
How is using code reviews for interviews better than actual coding?
Many roles such as a senior engineering manager or technical architect are more biased towards reading and evaluating code rather than writing code. This is also the case for roles like technical support or QA who may be tracing code, but not writing code. And in reality, we all use external resources when we typically code -- whether StackOverflow, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, or Reddit forums -- especially when we are dealing with algorithmically complex problems. Coding exercises artificially create a high-stress interaction that doesn't reflect how we build and ship software in real life.
How is CodeRev.app free?
It's designed to use mostly static resources and easily fits within the free tier of Google Firebase. It uses Firestore minimally and primarily stores source files in Storage which has a 1GB/day free limit. In short, CodeRev.app has been intentionally designed to be free for as long as possible. The only hard cost is the domain name renewal.
What features of CodeRev.app are privacy focused?
CodeRev.app allows teams and candidates to use an account with a generated identifiers rather than their actual email address. Deletions are permanent; there's no soft deletion here! There's no ads and minimal tracking (only Google Analytics to keep an eye on traffic). Of course, it's also open source so you can see exactly how the data is used (or not used, in this case!).
What's the stack?
Nuxt3 (Vue.js) + Quasar Framework + Google Cloud Firebase. Productive, fast, and more or less free.
Can you add [...]?
Send me an email or DM and let me know!