Their engineering head (director?) contacted me and asked to come in for a chat.

I was asked to do a technical test at home, in my own time, as well as write a paragraph on my proudest achievement.

The first exercise: given a JSON representation of customers and their distances from Dublin, send invitations to customers who are within a certain radius. Their JSON wasn't valid, so I had to fix that.

The second exercise: flatten an arbitrarily deep nested list of ints.

The email they sent to me with the link to the test had the URLs truncated, too, so I had to tell them about that.

My solutions were done in Python 3 and were of a pretty good standard, with tests, docstrings, type hinting and clean code.

A week later, I got a positive reply. I then had a video conversation with an engineer, for a 'culture fit'.

Five days after that, I was invited to the next stage: a day-long process in the office.

I spent the first hour or so alone in a room with an unfamiliar setup, tasked with some JavaScript. I didn't know JavaScript at the time and I didn't understand how to do web development either. Another one of those "surprise, we expect you to know stuff we never mentioned before!" interviews. If I'd known that JavaScript was a requirement from the start, I wouldn't have bothered. I failed to do anything in that hour. Afterwards, I was paired up with an engineer for a while. It was pretty humiliating.

Then came the whiteboarding (sigh, yes, really) with two engineers, asking me to design a database schema and data flow. A lot of the questions and instructions were vague and it felt like I was being intentionally prodded with passive-aggressive comments.

I don't remember the rest of the day. All I remember was wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Write a paragraph about your proudest achievement.