I’m the single founder behind codeboff.in. Thanks for the review!

You’ve hit a lot of great points in your critique. Let me address them here:

1. Pass/fail grading is crude: I agree, and I’m going to switch to percentage scores soon. Pass/fail was just the MVP compromise I took at the time. I’m thinking it might make it more interesting to include descriptions of what testcases a submission passed or failed. “Failed on long input”, “Failed on NULL input”, etc.

I might also fold some of this hint system into the test-taking process to make it more interactive for the candidate. That should avoid some false negatives where an otherwise good programmer failed to notice an edgecase or two that in real life they could have fixed cheaply.

2. Recording the whole session: I exclude that feature on purpose. There are a few good reasons: it makes the reporting more complex, and (I believe) open to misinterpretation. Worse, the candidate has to worry about how that session might look later, like an interviewer peering over their shoulder at whatever they’re scribbling. Another big reason is that I _want_ people to use vim, emacs or any other local editor they prefer, and be able to paste the code in without being penalized for it. The web-form is always going to be a poor substitute but it’s there if someone needs it.

3. Anti-cheating: I might drop that bit of copy from the frontpage. Current measures include server-side checks for the time-limit on submission if someone stops the Javascript timer, penalizing multiple refreshes (a hack that suspends the timer on some other online testing platforms) and a few other things.

4. More languages: definitely. Python, Java, Ruby for starters, more later.

Cheers
Karan