Congratulations for making it this far in the interview process for the Blend Apprenticeship!
This project seeks to better inform the Onramp team of your experience with programming as well as prepare you for your interview at Blend.
You have seven days to complete this project. We expect those who have a moderate level of development experience to spend between 30 and 40 hours to design, implement, document, and submit the project to us. Depending on your level, it may take more or less time, so please plan accordingly.
The project is due on Wednesday, January 13 at 9:00am PST/12:00pm EST
- Total time available to complete: 7 days
- Due date/time: Wednesday, January 13 at 9:00am PST/12:00pm EST
- Expected development time to complete: 30 - 40 hours
For this project, we want you to build a simple blog post web application that meets the following requirements:
- Build the blog application using TypeScript on the frontend. You can use either TypeScript or Go on the backend.
- Implement a database using PostGreSQL.
- Write Unit Tests
At a minimum, your app should allow for users to be able to:
- Create an account, login, and log out.
- CRUD functionality:
- Create a new blog post
- Read a blog post
- Update a post
- Delete a post
- Search for blog posts based on at least 2 factors (date, title, etc.)
- Favorite one or more blog posts at the same time.
- View all of their favorites.
**Note: you will need to detail where and how your app meets these requirements in your repository's README file when you submit your project.
You are actively encouraged to research the web, books, videos, or tutorials for this project. That said, we expect all code that is submitted to be your own (e.g. this project should NOT be completed with another person). That means that we expect each candidate to refrain from copying and/or pasting code into the project. If we find copied code in your project, we will have to disqualify you. Web and video resources are available at the end of this document.
We will evaluate your project by assessing the overall strength and quality of the following five factors:
A UI that converts all the requirements into user-friendly features. Assume the user is not tech savvy and needs the site to be intuitive. That said, do not focus all of your efforts on making a beautiful interface, it’s more important that the app works as expected and that you implement all of the requirements.
You may select any architectural design pattern you want to implement for this application (MVC, etc.) You must use one and identify the one you chose to use and why in the README when you submit.
An architecture pattern enables you to define a guide for how a piece of software should function, such that it can be scalable, maintainable, and testable.
Make sure to use version control with your app using a Github repository. A large part of building a successful project is showing us the versions you had of the project so we can see the progress that you made.
Unit testing is an important component of development. For this project, you will need to utilize a unit testing framework of your choice on at least one specific module of your application. You do not need to write integration tests or include other types of tests.
It's important to subscribe to a set of best practices when designing and implementing a web app. Be mindful of these widely accepted principles: Keep your code DRY (don't repeat yourself). Understand the big picture. Start with the user experience. Make sure your code is clean and simple. Using these principles will result in a high quality user experience and ensuring other developers can easily navigate through your code.
Each project submission must include a README file providing an overview of the application and details the app's overall architecture as well as your design decisions. Screenshots of the web app taken from the browser (localhost is fine) are also required. This task assesses the critical competency of communicating and documenting technical concepts.
You won’t be earning extra points for having a bunch of features. Focus on creating a clean, simple application that addresses all of the requirements, has well-tested features, and is documented properly for submission.
This repository will be your starting point. Please download (not clone or fork) this Github repository (INSERT GITHUB LINK HERE WHEN READY) and upload changes to a newly created repository. Once the web application has been completed, you'll be submitting a link to the new repository you created. Prior to submitting your project, you should update the README file to provide the following information:
- A high level architectural overview of your web application. e.g. names, relationships and purposes of all UI Components.
- Brief description of the architectural design pattern that you leveraged.
- An overview of the best practices you implemented.
- Screenshots of each page in your application and descriptions of the overall user flow.
You must submit your project by 9:00am PST/12:00pm EST on Wednesday, January 13 using this form. Be sure that your project is viewable by the Onramp team as a public repository. You can make it private after 1/28/21.
Once you’ve submitted your project, you are expected to stop working on it. Any commits that occur after submission or the deadline will not be reviewed.
Please use the modules and resources in the Blend Training Plan for resources and exercises on TypeScript and Version Control.