Case Study: CodeScreen

CodeScreen changes the game for developer recruitment by leveraging AWS Serverless and Lumigo troubleshooting & monitoring platform

Overview

CodeScreen is the world’s first automated take-home coding test framework. Candidates take tests offline using their own IDE and resources. This, combined with tight GitHub integration, provides a familiar and natural coding environment for candidates which results in them giving their best showing in the test.
Automated test scoring and analysis allows you to move through your candidate pipeline 10x faster than what was previously possible.

Technology Stack

The CodeScreen backend is based on AWS serverless, using components like AWS API Gateway, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB and many more. The team elected to leverage serverless architecture as it provided the best development velocity, coupled with the ability to quickly respond to customer requests.

The Challenge

 The team encountered two main challenges with their serverless-based application. The first was around troubleshooting. They found using an ELK logs aggregation tool difficult and time-consuming when trying to isolate specific events in order to solve problems. In an environment with many invocations to the same transactions and functions, it’s not a simple task to gain visibility over the specific stack trace one is trying to debug.

The second challenge was to get a clear view of the transaction flow. As the CodeScreen application evolved and new features were added on a daily basis, the team were left uncertain over the correct order of the functions and managed service calls.

The solution – Lumigo troubleshooting and monitoring platform

The team selected Lumigo to address the challenges it faced. The platform provided an immediate resolution. The team was presented with a single screen that showed the entire transaction flow – functions and managed services – with precise, relevant data for each specific invocation. 

The developers can view the message sent between the components, the return values, and the environment parameters of the specific invocation. Having all the data available substantially reduced the time it took to resolve issues and freed them up to focus on developing new features for their customers. Furthermore, integrating Lumigo alerts to their developer Slack channel helped the team to stay on top of issues in real-time.

Lumigo also helped the CodeScreen team to get a clear view over their ever-changing environment. Utilizing the visual system map, they were quickly able to understand the up-to- date transaction flows regardless of changes.

“Using Serverless helps the team push innovation very quickly, and with Lumigo, the speed is amazing,” said Dave Cervi, CodeScreen CEO & Founder. 

“The level of detail that is shown straight away when an error occurs is awesome, and the way the error is isolated for that particular Lambda invocation makes our lives so much easier.”

About CodeScreen

CodeScreen is the world’s first automated take-home coding test framework that results in the ability to screen developers 10x faster than what was previously possible. CodeScreen allows companies to create and use real-world take-home coding tests that will mimic the work that the candidate will do day to day in the job.

Visit the CodeScreen site.

Find out for yourself how much time and effort your team can save with serverless monitoring & troubleshooting from Lumigo. Start your 14-day free trial.

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