UserTesting uses this exercise as part of it's interviewing process for coding related positions.
Write a program for managing locker reservations at a hotel concierge desk. Customers leave bags with the concierge, who then uses your program to determine in which locker to place the bag. The program tells the concierge the number of the locker in which to place the bag, and prints a ticket to give to the customer. Upon return, the customer provides the ticket, and the concierge uses that to look up the corresponding locker, retrieve the bag, and return it to the customer.
There are 1000 small lockers, 1000 medium-‐sized lockers, and 1000 large lockers (it’s a big Vegas hotel). You can assume that all checked bags fit into one of these three sizes. The program should always assign the smallest available locker that fits the bag.
The general approach is that there will be three javascript arrays with 1000 elements each that represent the three types of lockers. The program initialises the arrays with 0's and as each bag is assigned to a locker of the appropriate type, the appropriate array element is set to 1.
For assigning a bag to a locker, the three locker types are 'looked-up' starting with the smallest bagtype first. Once an empty slot is found (as evidenced by a 0 in the array element), that slot is updated to 1, and the slot number and the locker types are returnes as an object and passed to a helper print function that simulates printing a ticket for the customer (does a console.log).
For retreiving a stored bag from a locker, the lockernumber and the lockertype are read in (these should be available from the ticket that the customer has), and the appropriate slot is then set to 0.
An alternative mechanism would have been to write/read just a single bag number and then cycle through each array, from the smallest bagtype upwards, unless you find an available slot. This would have required at least 3x number of operations, hence not attempted.
In order to make it easier for the browser to render the tests, i have put in a standard jasmine stand-alone lib folder. This folder is just a smaller subset of the code available on pivotals jasmine github repo and does not contribute to the solution in any way. I also added in a SpecRunner.html file for rendering the test results in the browser and the usual karma config files for karma runs.