Motivation

At Stripe, our interview process has some interviews where you write code, typically on your personal laptop.

We want to avoid spending a significant portion of the interview getting SBT setup on your laptop and waiting for it to download and cache all its dependencies. We've created this simple example SBT project to help candidates determine if their laptops are setup to write and build Scala, so the interviews can be about evaluating the candidate, and not the way their environment is setup.

Getting Ready

If you can run these commands, your development environment is probably ready for Stripe's Scala interview questions.

$ java -version
$ git clone [email protected]:stripe/scala-interview-prep.git
$ cd scala-interview-prep
$ ./sbt
> test
> run

About SBT and this this Project

SBT is the standard build tool in the Scala ecosystem. However, it is still common for many projects and organizations to use Maven, Pants, Gradle, etc.

If you prefer a different build environment, that's awesome. Some interview questions may ask to implement something from nothing, and some may want to watch you interact with a pre-existing codebase. For the former, it doesn't matter what you use, as long as you're able to get things setup quickly.

For the latter (interacting with a pre-existing codebase), we'll be using SBT. We aren't really specifically interested in how you write SBT project files, but want you to quickly get them up and running.

This project comes with a built-in sbt script that'll run on OS X or Linux. However, you can feel free to use your own SBT runner if you prefer.

Useful References

• Getting Started with sbt
• Installing sbt on Windows
• IDE Specific Instructions:
  • Intellij IDEA
  • Eclipse / Scala IDE