62. Crowdsourcing Code Translation

Parker Phinney, creator of Interview Cake, continues his discussion from a previous episode with Julián Duque, a developer advocate at Heroku. Interview Cake provides different interview questions and programming exercise that adapt to the programming language that a candidate is working on. Since their coursework is essential to helping users succeed, they made an effort to ensure that the work was done accurately.

First, they provided their entire course curriculum in Python, the programming language they were most familiar with. Then, they hired a team of language experts to convert those Python lessons into various other languages. Finally, they hired a second team of experts to review the work of the first team. This two-pass system allowed them to bootstrap expertise in almost a dozen different languages.

Parker continues by discussing some of the challenges involved in this system, including keeping track of the work and managing the funds for various individuals. He also talks about various improvements they are making to the pipeline for their next iteration of content.