/recruiting-back-end

Recruiting: Back-End Engineering

Back-end Coding Exercise

Overview

Here at ShootProof, we prefer to have a good idea of a candidate's technical experience before proceeding with portions of our recruiting process. We believe that the technical exercise below will illustrate a candidate's approach to working with technologies commonly used here at ShootProof.

Guidelines

The exercise consists of several different parts designed to showcase your problem-solving and solution-implementation talents. There is not a single correct answer; this is not an exam. We simply want to see how you approach a business problem and the steps you take to solve it.

  • This exercise should not take you more than two or three hours to complete. If your solution is taking longer, that's okay—be honest and let us know how long it took and why you think it took that long.
  • Be as thorough as you wish.
  • All exercises are to be performed as if you were on the job.
  • You may submit your response in one of the following ways:
    • Package an archive (ZIP, tarball, etc.) of your files and deliver it to your contact.
    • Fork our repository and open a pull request.

Exercise

Imagine that it's 2010, and ShootProof are starting to build our photo uploading and processing functionality. This exercise walks you through what it might take to design and build a very small portion of the ShootProof photo galleries feature.

Part 1: Data/domain modeling

Goal: define a data/domain model for photo galleries that contains albums and photos.

Define a data model that:

  • Allows a user to create a photo gallery.
  • Allows the photo gallery to have photos uploaded into it.
  • Allows the photo gallery to contain zero or more albums.
  • Optionally allows a photo to be placed within one or more albums.

A complete submission will:

  • Define all the relevant entities in the model.
  • Illustrate the relationships and, optionally, behaviors among the entities.
  • Describe the properties of each entity.
  • Be documented in a manner you deem appropriate to accomplish the goal (entity-relationship diagram, UML, etc.).

Extra credit

  • Include data definition language (DDL) statements to create tables for the data model. Define the columns present in each table, along with their data type and size.

Part 2: Object-oriented programming

Goal: convert the data/domain model defined in Part 1 into working PHP classes.

A complete submission will:

  • Define all the relevant namespaces and classes as illustrated in your model.
  • Include functionality to access and manipulate the data properties of each entity in the model.
  • Expose the relationships among the entities through the use of code.

Please note: Making database requests from these classes is not in the scope of this exercise. Instead, focus on translating the domain into classes.

Extra credit

  • Include code to illustrate any behaviors you've considered (this may be stubbed code).
  • Include unit tests for these classes; if included, we should be able to run the tests to see them passing.
  • Show the use of a third-party dependency integrated and used within your classes.

(Optional) Part 3: Hypermedia API design (REST)

Goal: design endpoints for a hypermedia API that will be used by API consumers to create, read, update, and delete galleries, albums, and photos.

A complete submission will:

  • Design JSON data structures for use in API requests and responses.
  • Illustrate what each of your data/domain model entities would look like when returned from the API.
  • Expose relationships among the entities through the use of hypermedia.
  • Define all the operations that may be performed on each entity through the API and map HTTP methods to these operations.
  • Show example HTTP requests and responses.

Extra credit

  • Document the API in a manner you deem appropriate to accomplish the goal (OpenAPI, API Blueprint, Markdown, etc.).
  • Describe the HTTP status codes that might be returned by each operation.
  • Design API error responses that might occur for certain operations.