About Barmaj
Why this exists, what we believe about how engineers actually grow, and what we refuse to do.
Why Barmaj exists
Every year, thousands of developers finish a course, build three portfolio projects, and start applying. They can write code. Many of them can write good code. And they get rejected, repeatedly, by companies that say they are looking for experience.
The gap is real, and it is not about knowledge. A junior developer who has never had a pull request reviewed does not know what a reviewer looks for. Someone who has never sat in a refinement does not know that the ticket is supposed to be questioned. Nobody has ever disagreed with their approach and made them defend it.
None of that can be learned from a tutorial, because a tutorial has no other people in it.
Barmaj is the environment those things happen in. Real tickets on a codebase you did not write, a squad to refine them with, and a senior engineer who reads every pull request and tells you what they think. It is deliberately unremarkable to anyone who has worked on a team — which is exactly why it is worth doing before your first role instead of during it.
What we believe
Feedback beats content
There is more free learning material than anyone can consume. What is scarce is someone experienced looking at your specific work and telling you what is wrong with it.
Evidence beats certificates
A certificate says you attended. A record of how you responded to review, attached to pull requests anyone can read, says how you work.
Ambiguity is the skill
Writing code from a complete specification is the easy part, and increasingly the automatable part. Working out what the specification should have said is the job.
Honest beats flattering
A reviewer who approves everything is not being kind. We would rather tell you something uncomfortable now than let you find out in an interview.
What we refuse to do
- Promise anyone a role at a company. We have no control over that and saying otherwise would be dishonest.
- Rank members against each other, or show anyone a leaderboard.
- Score people on commit counts, lines of code or pull request totals.
- Publish testimonials or numbers we have not earned.
- Write anything about how you work that a mentor cannot explain to you in one sentence.
You don’t need another tutorial.
You need experience.
Applications are read by a person, and places are limited by how many pull requests we can review properly each week.
Apply to Barmaj