Taro Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

I am trying to get better at System Design and trying to understand the design of various systems. I'm very curious about the System Design of Taro, and how Taro is built.

• What technologies are used for frontend and backend?
• What is the backend architecture used? What are the databases used?
• How are the videos streamed, payments handled, user logins handled?
• How does Taro scale with users and give a smooth experience?
• How is the platform optimized from the perspective of cloud costs?
• When the number of users on Taro increases by an order of magnitude, what are the changes to the architecture you would consider doing?
• Is the website built from scratch? Or are there any libraries and frameworks available to make it easier?
• Taro seems like a well-built platform with smooth user experience and a lot of features. I'm surprised that all of this built by just one engineer (Charlie). What's the secret sauce? What are the tradeoffs made to still make things work with less resources?
• What is the decision-making process that went into making all these decisions?

If I would like a feature request, where would I post this? For example, my feature request would be a time elapsed text for Taro course videos. It would be great to see our progress even more visualized as watch videos (in addition to seeing the percentage bar so we know how much time we have left to complete a course)

Questions for Alex and Rahul which I know were covered in some videos somewhere in snippets, but maybe not all in one question. Taro has amassed a lot of great content in its courses and blogs -- how long did it take to create initial MVP of quiz app before the Taro founders quit their jobs to go and work on Taro full time as a startup entrepreneurs?

• When did the founders pivot?
• How long did it take to create initial content (blogs over the years, lots of videos, powerpoints etc.)?

It's impressive to see the amount of rich content, how long did it take for Rahul and Alex to conceptualize Taro (in its early form, name), what ways did they test the success metrics of various pieces of content for a single feature (video series, single video/blog etc.) - how well did they perform over a given period of time?

I'm curious what the vision for Taro in the next year will be and also what Taro will ideally look like after 5 years. Also curious what the roadmap looks like

It'll be fun to follow up on this and see how far off it'll be :)

I'm curious since you now have the opportunity to design and interview candidates as you see fit, how would you design the interview for your next hire?

How many rounds?

Any takehomes?

how would you source your candidates?

what are things you would do to avoid doing the terrible interview practices companies usually do?

How would you interview a candidate for a backend role vs a frontend role?

For people not in US looks harder to engage with this community. So I wonder how taro has helped you in your journey?

I know this is different for Alex, Rahul, and Charlie, but am particularly interested in Charlie's answer since he's the main developer (right?)