In a land before time, SeatGeek created an extremely hackable admin panel. Its primary purpose was to stir the curiosity of developers who might be looking for a new job. You can read more about it in this previous post.
While the response over the years to the dev challenge was great, we retired the dev challenge over a year ago. Please stop trying to hack into our backend! (If you do happen to be hacking our website, we’d appreciate a heads-up on any vulnerabilities you find at hi@seatgeek.com Responsible disclosure and whatnot.
In order to cater to the curious, I took the opportunity to open source the dev challenge. It’s a small Sinatra app that you can run locally and hack to your heart’s content.
A few notes about the panel:
- Configuration is done using environment variables with a few sane defaults.
- You’ll need a local SMTP server to send email notifications of new applicants. We used postfix at the time, but you can use whatever you’d like.
- Applicant resumes are stored on disk. Yes, we know, there are probably better ways than what we did, but since the box was in a DMZ, it was probably okay. Not like we weren’t trying to have you hack us anyhow.
- Ruby 1.9.3 is what we used to deploy—actually 1.9.1 at the time, but it works with 1.9.3—but no guarantees that it will work with a newer Ruby. Pull requests welcome!
We’d like to thank all the thousands of developers who have hacked our backend over the years. Don’t worry, we’ll have a new challenge soon.
In the meantime, we’re still hiring engineers.