Interview preparation

Thanks for interviewing at Stripe. To make sure that we can use our time best in the interview, we'd like to have you do some setup in advance.

We've noticed that more often than not, we've had to spend a significant portion of the interview helping candidates setup a CMake-based C++ environment on their personal laptops.

We've created a (rather ad-hoc) CMake project to help candidates determine if their laptops were setup to write C++, so interviews can be about evaluating the candidate, and not the way their environment is setup.

Getting ready

First, clone this repository to your computer (creating a fork of the repository is not necessary). Next, ensure that you have cmake, a C++ compiler and libcurl installed.

Linux or macOS

• If you're using Debian or Ubuntu, you likely want to run

# One command, spread over several lines...
sudo apt-get install \
  cmake build-essential \
  libboost-all-dev \
  libcurl4-openssl-dev libcurlpp-dev

• If you're using macOS with HomeBrew installed, you might want to run brew install cmake curl.

If you can run these commands, your development environment is probably ready for Stripe's C++ interview questions:

$ cmake --version
$ git clone [project URL]
$ cd [into the project]
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make
$ ./hello

Windows (Visual Studio)

• Make sure you have the C++ CMake tools for Windows installed. These should automatically be there if you selected C++ as a language when installing Visual Studio. There are more instructions on installing CMake in Visual Studio here.

• Install libcurl using vcpkg. Open Windows PowerShell and run the following

  git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
  cd vcpkg
  .\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
  .\vcpkg.exe integrate install
  .\vcpkg.exe install --triplet x64-windows curl[tool]
  

• Optionally, you can also install boost via vcpkg if you would like to use it. (This will take a while, 30mins or more!)

  vcpkg install --triplet x64-windows boost
  

• Setup the project in Visual Studio

  • Make sure you open the folder with this repository via File > Open > Folder menu item and Visual Studio should automatically detect and run cmake.exe.
  • Double click on CMakeLists.txt and that should trigger a build. The output window should not show any errors once CMake completes.
  • There are more details on using CMake with Visual Studio here.

• You should now be able to right click on helloworld.cpp in Solution Explorer and be able to compile and debug(run) the code

Other platforms or if you want to debug

• You can find installation instructions for CMake here.
• You can find installation instructions for libcurl here.