This repository contains a project used by the L2L Engineering team for technical interviews. The goal of this exercise is to evaluate how you would do in adding a custom Django filter. If you are experienced in Django this may seem like a very simple exercise. That's good. If you are new to Django but experienced in programming in general and specifically in web technologies this may require some digging through documentation which is also good. If you are new this may take up to an hour. If you find that this exercise takes longer than 60 minutes you may want to reach out to your L2L contact to see if there is a misunderstanding in the directions or we may have a bug in our documentation below. The intent is not to take a ton of your time so please reach out if you find something difficult or incompatible with your environment.
In order to complete this exercise the first thing you will need to do is fork this repo to your own personal github repo. Once you have done that you can continue the exercise. This exercise can be completed on any modern OS using a terminal (Windows (use wsl), OSX, Linux, etc). After forking this repo, clone your repo down to your own computer. If you are new to programming this is a great resource: github docs
On your computer you will want to create a python virtual environment in order to contain the libraries necessary to run the example web application. In your cloned repo directory run the following commands:
$ which python3$ <output of previous command> -m venv l2lpyenv$ . ./l2lpyenv/bin/activate$ pip install Django==3.2.3$ python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080
You should now see output indicating that the Django site is running. If you run into a situation where you are told that the version of sqlite is not compatible with the Django version you are running you can run the following commands. If everything is working, skip over these steps.
$ wget https://www.sqlite.org/2018/sqlite-autoconf-3240000.tar.gz$ tar zxvf sqlite-autoconf-3240000.tar.gz$ cd sqlite-autoconf-3240000/$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local$ make$ sudo make install
If you needed to run the above steps for sqlite then you will want to run the following command before starting django with the runserver command:
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib$ python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080
At this point you will only need to run the runserver command in order to start the web server. If you go to a browser
you can now open the main page served by the web server by entering something like http://localhost:8080/ into the
url address bar. Congrats you can follow directions :-)
You are now set to work on adding a custom Django filter to the application. If you look inside
l2l/templates/l2l/index.html on lines 60 and 61 there are two comments. You need to figure out how to create custom
filter and write the code that implements the l2l_dt filter. You will need to uncomment line 2 of index.html as well in
order to register the filter with the template. Feel free to name your filter whatever you'd like. The l2l_extras
template tag and the l2l_dt filter names are what we used in creating the exercise. Your filter needs to handle receiving a date object and a
string. The string format will be in the following format: "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S". Your filter should print the results
in the following format: "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S". You will know you have succeeded when you can hit the main web page
after removing the comments on lines 60 and 61 and the browser shows the results accurately.
L2L is a completely remote work environment. We utilize a lot of remote technology to communicate and stay up-to-date with each other. Instead of creating a pull request, the correct thing to do now is push your local changes up to your forked repo, then create a short loom video showing the end result, talking through any interesting decisions or directions you took, and finally send an email with a link to your commit and a link to your loom video to the L2L employee you are coordinating this exercise with.