Original instructions

https://github.com/flockcover/tech-screen-instructions/blob/master/Task1.md

Assumptions

No authentication is required
The data is fairly static and gets updated approx. once a day (and hence this will dictate the cache expiry value)

Technology choices

I chose to use Node 'express' for it's performance and maturity and flexibility as a framework as well as being something that I've used in previous projects.

For the caching choices, although memcache will likely perform better for small/simple data sets, Redis was chosen as a longer term solution due to it's flexibility and it's support of a variety of data structures.

Technical compromises

I have used javascript to build a solution quickly but if many more features were expected in the future I would consider rewriting in Typescript or another statically typed solution like FlowJS.

The retry logic is simplistic and there may be better solutions for this so this is something that should be reviewed.

Request validation could be improved and moved into a separate module and should be if additional routes are implemented.

How to run

The server (and the redis instance) are deployed on Heroku and the server URL is:
- https://flock.herokuapp.com
Valid requests are:
- Get all drones: https://flock.herokuapp.com/drones
- Get individual drone detail: https://flock.herokuapp.com/drones/:id
As described in src/test/requests-test.js

If running locally and/or with a local redis instance:

add a .env file to the root of the project
add the supplied REDIS_URL value to the .env file
Download Redis here: http://download.redis.io/redis-stable.tar.gz
Start redis by running: redis-server
- To clear the redis cache run: redis-cli FLUSHALL
git clone the repo and run: npm install
Start the server with: npm start
Run the tests using: npm test

Future features