YC Prep – Interview simulation app

Open-sourcing Anima’s prep-questions app

TL;DR: Back in 2018, when our YC interview was scheduled, we built an app to help us prepare for it. Having many companies asking us for a simulated interview, we’ve decided to rebuild the app using Anima and open-source it ❤️ Here’s a live link.

More tips on how to get into YCombinator are available here.

So what is this code?

Most of the code was written automatically with Anima, given a Figma design. Anima converts design into code. In this case, Figma to React.

Starting from a boilerplate code with all the design means you fast forward to implementing the logic. We are doing a lot to produce developer-friendly code. The result is not yet perfect, but it requires minor tweaks in most cases.

Behind the scenes, we do A LOT of heavy lifting to give you super clean code. To name a few of the algorithms:

  • Automatically name elements (i.e ‘vector567’ -> ‘Share icon’)
  • Automatically tagging elements (i.e detecting h1 / h2 / p, etc.)
  • Restructure the DOM as close as possible to what a human engineer would with multiple heuristics
  • Unwrapping divs and creating flex-based divs for a tidy layout
  • Merging elements
  • Removing redundant elements
  • Extract CSS variables & classes for repeating colors, fonts, and more
  • Find repeating DOM patterns and refactor to components And much more.

In addition, we run visual tests with headless browsers on multiple resolutions, to make sure you’re getting pixel-perfect code.

Again, our code is not perfect yet, as you will see in this repo. However, the fact that it is 10x faster to build products is mind-blowing for everyone building an MVP, POC or even a demo.

How to run this code

In Terminal, go into the project’s folder, then –

npm install
npm start

Open http://localhost:1234.

How to deploy to netlify

If you don’t have netlify:

npm install netlify-cli -g 

Once you do have netlify:

npm run build
netlify deploy

Choose dist folder when asked, and you’ll get a link on netlify to your React app. Use netlify deploy --prod when you have the final result, and get a sharable link.

Any feedback is welcome ?

GitHub

View Github