5 months ago I was called by a recruiter for a position in a startup building cloud-computing solutions. At the end of my first interview with the engineers of the company, I was asked to write a little web application to test my technical abilities.

The goal was to create a back-end talking to Microsoft’s Live Connect API and keep a cache of user profiles. Then a front-end demonstrating my HTML/CSS/JS know-how was to be built. User authentication was supposed to use OAuth  .

The only technological constraint was to use Python. I decided to use CherryPy and Mako to leverage the boilerplate code I just released back then . For the persistent layer, my first intention was to use SQLAlchemy , but quickly switched to MongoDB as I never played with it and this project was a great opportunity to.

If my web app was far from finished, it was still well-received by the team. After other interviews I was made an competitive offer. I finally declined as I wanted to finish what I stated at my current company.

What’s left of this experience is Live Browser , the web app I created, which source code is now available on GitHub  .