I started using Railway mid-year 2023, and it stuch because of the following personal reasons:
- Ease of use: I always wanted to be able to deploy an application and not feel understaffed or insufficient because of the variety of issues that may arise. For example, I spun an RDS instance on AWS and couldnt connect to it remotely from another VM on AWS and even locally and Digital ocean. Guess what, after debugging extensively I found out I had to create a route group and add the RDS instance to the route group and then configure the route group to be publicly accessible. Like 🤷♂️
- Hidden charges: I still have PTSD recieving some billing invoices from Google after deploying 2 running instances of an Application on App Engine. For AWS, something always feels off recieving thier billing notification every morning notifying me that I have exceeded the threshold I set to be notified of growing changes in my billing.
- Logging: Relying on other services to observe/visualize your app performance is quite another drawback for me. I would have loved a scenario where the next information you need is not dependent on at lest 5 more mouse clicks or page navigations - it is tedious.
Enter Railway
For me, Railway gives the much needed developer experience to deploy applications, and scale them automatically with minimal config material. Plus the cheap and transparent billing based on my usage.
This is what attracted me to Railway 😊. They are basically Heroku with broader customizations and lesser restrictions.
My assessment
I was initially required to submit my resume as part of their vetting process, but I figured, since they have the requirements listed there I could just be "proactive" and try to deliver a good assessment.
Below were the interview requirments:
My Experience
Writing out the assessment project was straight forward, the only issues I encountered was with their GraphQL API not working in some mutation scenarios. But overall, well designed - they must have the 10x engineers there.
View the live URL here:
- Frontend Client - https://railway-assessment-client.vercel.app
- Backend Server - https://railway-assessment-api-production.up.railway.app
View the repositories here: