Platform Test

Implemented

Back end API, MVC style
- Heartbeat endpoint for testing & monitoring
Player modeling
- SQL database with migrations
- Create (and Show, for debugging) endpoint
Battle initiation
- queued for async processing using redis queue
Leaderboard implementation
- uses a redis sorted set so this is fast

Out of Scope (Also known as: things I didn't get to in time!)

Battle processor & battle engine logic, this looked fun, but I didn't get there
Auth (I like basic auth headers and JWTs for authz policies, can use redis cache to make this fast, bring it into middleware)
Hosting
Deployment (and CI/CD)

I might have done more, but I wanted to do things to a reasonable standard and Python isn't my native language. Overall I'm happy with what I achieved; I aimed for extensibility and believe it would be pretty easy to keep working on this application and smooth the rough edges to make it production-ready.

Tools

pipenv – environment & dependency management
git - source control
asdf - language version management
postman - API development & QA
vscode – code editor
macOS - Mojave 10.14.6

Technology Choices

python - 3.6.7
flask – web framework
sqllite – db (not acceptable for production, it's gitignored to make the demo convenient)
SQLAlchemy – ORM
flask migrate - db schema migrations
pytest - test runner
pylint - (editor integrated) linting
redis queue - async battle processing
redis - 4.0.2 powers the queue, provides fast access & convenient data structures for leaderboard
dotenv - secrets are injected into the application environment and excluded from the git repo

Usage

Install deps (and any required tools not installed):

pipenv install

Establish .env from .env sample:

cp .env.sample .env

Create database & run migrations for dev and test dbs:

pipenv run flask db upgrade
TESTING=1 pipenv run flask db upgrade

You will need to start Redis in whatever way appropriate for your system. I am using RedisApp.

Run tests:

pipenv run pytest

Run the web server:

pipenv run python app.py