Full-stack engineer with 4 years at Amazon, now building Devana. Jacob founded Devana, an AI mock interviewer for software engineers, and writes the guides on this site: the company interview guides, the comparisons of interview practice tools, and the coding and system design pattern guides.
Why I built Devana
A couple of months ago I was stuck. I'd spent 4 years as a full-stack engineer at Amazon and solved more than 500 LeetCode problems, yet I kept walking out of interviews knowing my communication had let me down. I could get to the answer. I couldn't explain how I was getting there while someone watched.
The usual advice is to do mock interviews. But finding a partner at odd hours was a hassle, and most practice platforms only check your code, not how you talk through it. So a friend and I spent the last few months building the tool I wanted: Devana.
Devana runs a realistic mock interview with an AI interviewer, so you can practice the talking part before the real thing:
- Talk through your approach, edge cases and time complexity out loud, before and while you write code.
- Paste any problem you're working on, from a tricky practice question to one tagged for a company, and run a mock interview on it.
- After every session, see where your code, your logic or your explanation slipped.
- Practice from a built-in bank of over 500 coding questions.
Why build it when other options exist? Peer platforms depend on matching schedules and partners who actually show up, and coaching with real interviewers gets expensive. Grinding problems alone never trains you to speak. I wanted practice that's there 24/7, without judgment, on any problem I choose.
What Jacob works on
Devana is an AI mock interview platform for software engineers. Jacob builds it: the interviewer, Josh, who runs coding, system design, behavioral and resume-based rounds by voice; the editor that runs your code; and the scored report at the end of every session. The mock interviews by round page shows how each one works.
He also writes the guides on this site:
- Company interview guides, such as the Google software engineer interview process and Amazon's, built on what each company publishes about how it interviews.
- Comparisons of practice tools, such as the best mock interview tools for software engineers and interviewing.io pricing and alternatives.
- Pattern guides for coding, system design and behavioral rounds, on the Learn pages.
- Preparation guides, such as how to prepare for interview questions about your resume.
How we write these guides
- Company guides start from the company's own pages. Where a company publishes how it interviews, such as Amazon's interview prep pages, OpenAI's interview guide, Microsoft's interview tips, Google's re:Work guide, Netflix's culture memo or Stripe's operating principles, the guide quotes and links it. Where a detail comes only from candidates' accounts, the guide says it is reported, not official.
- Prices are read on each vendor's own pricing page, on the date the page shows, for example "checked October 2026". Most of those pages draw their prices with JavaScript, so they are read in a browser, not from a cached copy. Where a vendor does not say something, the guide says "not stated" rather than guessing.
- Facts about Devana come from the product itself. Plan limits, session lengths and scoring are checked against the code and the pricing data, not against earlier copy.
- No paid placements. No company pays to appear in a guide or for where it appears, and the guides carry no affiliate links. Devana is our own product, so wherever it appears in a comparison the page says so.
- No invented numbers. A statistic, rating or quote goes in only with a source that can be linked, and a figure that cannot be sourced is taken out rather than estimated. Example answers, resumes and practice problems are written for the guides and labeled as examples.
- Dates are real. "Updated" appears only when a guide was materially revised, and search engines get the same date. Facts that age, such as competitor prices, are re-checked periodically.
Corrections and questions
If you find something wrong in a guide, or something that has changed since it was checked, please say so through the contact page, and it will be corrected. The same goes for questions about Devana itself.