This is my submission for the Shopify Developer Intern Challenge. I chose to implement a backend for a fictional inventory tracking web application.
Apart from the basic CRUD functionalities for inventory, this application implements soft-deletion with comments.
I used TypeScript running on Node.js for my backend. I feel using a statically-typed language is a great tool in catching trivial errors otherwise missed with untyped languages.
I used Next.js to create the backend using API routes as the developer experience with Next.js is fast and efficient. I also wanted to leave the possobility of adding a frontend time permitting.
I implemented a GraphQL endpoint which is attached to API routes in Next.js. I chose to use GraphQL as it creates a interface that both frontend and backend engineers can use in a way that works for them. I also like how a lot of the documentation is built from just the schema. The GraphQL endpoint was implemented using Nexus, a type-safe way of defining GraphQL schemas.
For the data persistence, I used Prisma with sqlite3. Having typings for the models used in the database made typing every smooth and easy. As the queries required in this application were not very complicated, I felt an object-relational-mapper would work well here.
For testing, I used Jest as my testing framework. I implemented tests for the GraphQL queries and mutations while I developed my application.
First, run the development server:
npm run dev
# or
yarn devOpen http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.
The GraphQL endpoint and the GraphiQL playground can be found at http://localhost:3000/api/graphql.
If some seed data is desired, npx prisma db seed can be excuted and some cool shirts and jeans will be added to the database.
To execute the tests, run npm test and this will start executing the tests.
For future work, I would implement the following features and fixes:
While the GraphQL does some data validation, I would implement further data validation on mutations like character length and invalid language on product titles etc. I demonstrated some of this against the quantity property on the inventory objects.
While there are test cases for mutations and queries, I would try to further make these tests more robust. The currently implemented tests are moreso integration tests as they all hit the database layer. I would like to abstract the database away in further development for a better development experience as well as making sure unit tests and integration tests exist where they are appropriate.