I heard back this morning (Monday 6th July) that I wasn’t selected to implement the limited project this summer adding support for forms at Typst. I thought the interview (on Wednesday 1st July) had gone relatively well, as I had identified a number of issues with my take-home assignment in advance, and thought that I had demonstrated a reasonable ability to refine and improve the design in the 1-hour interview. In any case, it was nice to receive some written feedback about why I wasn’t selected:
The section of your take home about type mappings in the API was well thought-out and matches Typst design spirit. Groups and fieldsets were one of the focal areas you chose for the take home and we zeroed in on them during our interview. We felt like at the end of the interview, we still did not achieve clarity about the rationale, use, or implementation of groups and did not manage to sufficiently differentiate them from field sets. During our interview, we also noticed that having the editor open at times did more harm than good as it took focus away from the conversation. Nevertheless, both your presentation of Rheo and the take home were approachable and showed that you did your research.
All in all, this seems a fair assessment, and suggests to me that the main reason I wasn’t selected is because another candidate was a better fit / performed more impressively in the take-home and interview. There were some unresolved issues with groups/fieldsets from the interview, and though I personally felt that I made good progress on smoothing them out over the course of the interview, it’s possible that there are deeper contours of the PDF/HTML spec that I hadn’t considered that render my design fundamentally weak or otherwise inappropriate. The feedback about having my editor open is interesting, too. I personally felt that we were able to specify and resolve several issues precisely because we were looking at concrete examples. But it’s useful to know that this was most likely a solipsistic experience, rather than a feeling shared by my interviewers, and I will certainly keep this comment in mind during future interviews / pair-programming sessions.
I’ll of course be curious to track the implementation of forms as it does happen over the course of this summer; and to learn more about Typst from the design that bested my proposal! Though I’m naturally a little disappointed that I didn’t get this gig, it does free me up a little to focus on my dissertation and other projects that are beginning to get into flight this summer (see Konrad below, for example). So the disappointment at least hit this morning with a slight touch of relief.