Great. On 2, we are currently live in US and India so are available in that geography. We couldn't do much about recommendations coming from other geographies (as we don't have many partner companies there) so have put that limit.
On 1, yeah, we do make exceptions there. we have not yet decided if we want to keep it a hard limit but we are sure that we would want recommendations from people that would have definitely worked directly with software engineers.
Ah, my fault on point 2, I'm on vacay in Uganda and didn't turn on my VPN but usually in the U.S. Sounds good, very cool idea and I'll be signing up shortly