You’re tasked with reviewing the code challenge of another candidate. You download the project.zip file, extract it, and it doesn’t run. You can’t tell what part of the code is auto-generating scaffolding, or what part is the complex part. You can’t really get an idea of if the code would work, or was even written by the candidate. You don’t even know if they did the entire project in one big commit or not. As long as there’s nothing horribly wrong, you’ll pass them.

Most companies have some kind of code challenge in their interview process. While you may like or dislike this practice for different reasons, one thing that can easily remove a bunch of headaches here is to stop asking for zip-files of that project.

Git already provides a wonderful feature called a "git bundle". It is a way to package a git repository into single file which contains the entire git repository, and even branches. Generating one is the easiest thing imaginable. If your present working directory is inside a repository, you can simply run this command: