At Stripe, our interview process has some interviews where you write code, typically on your laptop.

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

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

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

$ java -version
$ git clone [the project\'s URL]
$ cd [into the project]
$ mvn clean -e install
$ java -jar target/sample-HEAD-SNAPSHOT.jar

Don't read into the chosen libraries too much. We've added them to help alleviate two main problems that may be seen after maven is setup:

• Maven works correctly with third-party dependencies
• Maven's classpath is setup correctly

If you know prefer different configuration files, that's awesome. Some interview questions may ask to implement something from nothing, and some may want to watch you interact with a pre-existing codebase. For the former, it doesn't matter what you use, as long as you're able to get things setup quickly.

Concerning the latter: Maven tends to be the most common format Java libraries are distributed as. Because of that, all pre-existing codebases we use in our interviews use maven. We aren't really specifically interested in how you write Maven project files, but want you to quickly get them up and running.

• Installing Maven
  • using Homebrew, on OS X
  • more instructions for Windows
• Apache Maven FAQ