Koderank is an online whiteboard that provides an environment for quick and easy coding interviews. Interviewers can give candidates small coding exercises to gauge their abilities, and can view the code live as it is being typed. Voice chat is available through Twilio Client to allow the interviewer and candidate to converse during the session.

I originally created it for the Twilio Client launch contest and it was selected as one of five winning entries. The first iteration was done in Python/jQuery. As a learning exercise, I reimplemented it in Go language and Closure Library.

One of the fun things about using a language as new as Go is that a lot of third-party libraries haven’t been released yet, so you often get to be the pioneer, although it sometimes means a few arrows in your back. Here are a couple tools I had to create:

• Twilio Client Capability. Used for creating and packaging scope definitions. I ported some functions over from John Sheehan’s C# project.
• Base 62 UUID’s. This is based off a suggestion by Russ Cox for creating simple UUID’s. For URL compression, I wrote a method that converts it to base 62. It requires the math/big package to convert the 32 character hexadecimal number into a 23 character base 62 string.

Sometimes it’s nice not to have to write everything yourself, though. Kudos to the developers of the third party libraries that I used such as Diff-Match-Patch, CodeMirror, and GoJWT. They’re credited on the About page. In the same spirit, I’m opening the source to the Koderank website which you can now find on github: Koderank source. It runs on App Engine and uses the Channel API for sending data to the listening browser. The server and client-side are written in Go and Closure Library, respectively.

I’ve written previously about my experiences with Go and Closure.