Cool, it's nice to see one of my projects make the rounds again. CoderPad has gone from frustrating "I can't believe no one's built this yet, interviews are so annoying" to a thing actual people are paying me for, and I have HN to thank for a lot of that early traffic.
If anyone here has any questions about CoderPad, please feel to ask here, or if it looks like this topic's dropping off the frontpage, I'm always available at me@vincentwoo.com.
Just as some hopefully useful feedback, I found "If CoderPad prevents you from bringing in even one on-site candidate that you wouldn’t hire, it pays for itself immediately in time saved" difficult to parse. Is it trying to highlight that you don't have to physically bring someone in, or that it's better for evaluating people, or both? The double-negative along with the 'even one' seems to contribute to the issue. Also, saying "If CoderPad prevents you" sounds a bit too negative to me.
Your front page is scant on details, and I really don't like providing both email and a password just to figure out if I should send money to somebody. You don't have a published privacy policy, which reinforces that feeling.
Okay, so you say you do C++. What does that mean? Can you compile and see error messages? The editor in the demo has no line numbers - is there any hope in actually deciphering the errors and fixing the problem? Can I, the interviewer, provide or run unit tests against the code? Does the editor have things like auto-complete, code formatting, etc?
Okay, I gave up, I signed up. It's pretty cool, no, strike that, very cool. I had no idea from your front page. It wasn't clear at first that I could experiment endlessly without using my 2 pad quota, which was another thing to add friction for me to try it out. I can see that I can easily paste in some unit tests for the user to use. But, do you have boost, gtest, etc? What version of Python (and all other languages) do you support? What C++ compiler and version are you using? I tried some C++11 code, and it compiled, which is nice, but should I really need to type in test code to figure out what is supported?
Site seems very hacked together. Now that I am signed in, I have no way to get back to the start page, the FAQ, and whatever links you had on that front page. The code of my pads seems to somewhat overlay the ad links (select your plans) below. One I start editing code, there is no back button. If I use the browser's back button, sure I end up where I was - at the profile, with the new pad I just created not listed as one of my pads until I hit refresh on the browser. If I create a bunch of pads, it just creates them in a never ending expanding list - will I have ways to sort through for different candidates, times, etc? I kind of wonder what happens when you get to 50-60, as you don't seem to be storing them in a container - am I going to end up with a huge unmanageable page? Can I delete pads?
I also am not crazy about your tiers, though I recognize it is a common strategy. Small shops hire in bursts - a few months go by with few to no interviews, you get funding or a new contract, and suddenly you have 100 people to interview. Do I need to pay for a high tier so I can deal with the bursts? What if I buy the 20/month, and need 21 pads? Can I change my subscription level on a monthly basis? Is it really safe for me to just type my credit card number into your site? Why doesn't this just scale to my needs - why do I have to subscribe to tiers? Amazon doesn't make me pay for computer services I am not using, why do you?
I'm not looking for the answers to any of the above in this thread - I'm not going to recommend that my company pays for a service that cannot describe itself on it's webpage but eagerly provides me with fields with my credit card info, and whose only contact information is "me". There's not even an address - what recourse do I have if you take my data, or I have billing issues? Are you in the US, the UK, Argentina? Finally, I don't believe you can actually provide 24/7 support. I'm emailing "me@vincentwoo.com" - I doubt one person can service enterprise scale use 24/7. I don't even know what your infrastructure is - are you using AWS such that you can easily add nodes as needed, or is this run on a box in your basement that dies when the power goes out?
You're right, frankly, a lot of the web-facing stuff isn't quite there yet. I would say that this is because I have been working on improving the technical offering for my current customers, and that this HN posting has caught me in the middle of a frontpage redesign. I'm sorry about that.
As for the language versions, privacy policy, etc - those will be coming soon, but you can be assured I'm not NSA'ing you guys.
The tiering is because most shops favor cost predictability over scale-to-your-needs billing, which smooths out acccounting. I understand your concern here, though, and the pricing is still definitely very new (like the rest of this site).
My site is in fact on top of AWS (heroku), and I have 0 doubt about my ability to scale to enterprise usage. I've invested a fair amount in the architecture thinking up front, and I eagerly await a reason to pull the switch on my dyno counts. Unfortunately, I need an excuse to do it, but I might just spin up 20 nodes and do a load test for fun one of these days.
Anyhow, I'm glad that you at least like the product. Hopefully improvements to the landing page will be present soon. Sorry that your experience with it was so unfavorable.
If anyone here has any questions about CoderPad, please feel to ask here, or if it looks like this topic's dropping off the frontpage, I'm always available at me@vincentwoo.com.