Our coding challenge is your opportunity to demonstrate your experience, skills, and aptitude by building a prototype of the web’s most minimal referral automation software.
Your submission will be reviewed by the Ambassador engineering team. We take your experience level into consideration when reviewing.
We value quality over completeness. If you decide to leave things out, please call attention to it in your project's README. We are looking to evaluate your skill set and gain insight into how you approach problem solving.
Our assessment covers the following areas:
- Architecture - How have you decided to structure your app? Is there good separation of concerns?
- Code quality - Are you following good coding practices? Is your code easy to follow and maintain? Is it testable?
- Correctness - Does your application work? Does it meet the functional spec?
- Technical choices - Are your choices of libraries, packages, and tooling appropriate?
Bonus points:
- Testing - Is there adequate test coverage?
- UX - Is your project easy to use and understand?
This project may take some time depending on your familiarity with the frameworks and tools you choose. Make your initial commit very small or blank so that we can get a sense of your style and speed. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Begin by forking this repo. You will be completing the challenge in the forked repo and sending a link to your repo when you're finished.
The year is 1991, and Tim Berners-Lee has just invented the World Wide Web. As his best friend, he turns to you for help growing this crazy new thing. You decide referral marketing is the most effective way to grow support for Tim’s invention and plan to bring word of mouth to the web in the form of a simple, automated referral system.
The system you’ve dreamt up is very straightforward. It only needs two pages to satisfy Tim’s needs: one to create, edit, delete, and track referral links and another to serve as a landing page for the links that promotes the World Wide Web.
The link page is where Tim will manage his referral links. This page should be located at the root of your domain i.e. {your_url}. There should be a form to add links. It only needs one field, which is the unique title of the link e.g. spartans or wolverines. This title will form the referral url e.g. {your_url}/spartans or {your_url}/wolverines. Below this form should be a list of the active referral links with options to edit or delete links. The # of times a link has been clicked should be tracked and displayed next to each link in the list. The link title should link to the Landing Page.
The landing page is where each referral link should redirect. This page should be located at its own unique url i.e. {your_url}/landing. The content of this page is not important, though you should feel free to use it as a canvas to promote and express your feelings toward the World Wide Web for Tim. When each referral link redirects to the landing page, the link title must be appended as a query parameter in the url e.g. {your_url}/{link_title} or {your_url}/landing/?link={link_title}. The link title should be grabbed from the query parameter and displayed somewhere on the landing page, which is the only content you actually have to include.
Choose one of the following technical tracks to build the functionality described in the Functional spec that best suits your skill set:
- Back-end track: build a REST API and include a minimal front-end (e.g. a browsable API)
- Front-end track: build your project as a purely client-side app
- Full Stack: blend the former approaches, but be sure to demonstrate your competence across the stack
- Mobile track: use the native SDKs for Android or iOS
Your task is to build a REST API that can support the functionality described for the Link and Landing pages in the functional spec. Your project can be built using any API framework/language, though we encourage the use of Django Rest Framework/Python as these are used every day at ambassador. Your API should be able to:
- Perform CRUD actions for Link pages
- Track the number of visits to the Landing Page
You do not have to build a functional UI unless you want to show off your talents across the stack. We will test your API by using the Browsable API. You are encouraged to write tests to verify your own results.
Your project can be built using any JavaScript or CSS framework, though we encourage ReactJS, Redux and CSS/SCSS as these are used every day at Ambassador. You are also welcome to use our React-ions library to help build your UI.
Alternatively, feel free to swap out similar JavaScript frameworks such as Angular and UI kits such as Bootstrap. In addition to building the referral application, complete the HTML/CSS challenge which can be found in the /html-css-exercise folder in the repo.
If you're interviewing for a mobile position, use the native SDKs for Android or iOS to build the UI described above. Usage of open-source libraries is not required, but feel free to demonstrate your knowledge of the mobile ecosystem (ex. the libraries at http://square.github.io/). If you're interviewing for a combination Front-end/Mobile position, you can blend in your Front-end work into the app using a WebView.
In your repo, please include the following items in your README:
- Description of the problem and solution.
- Whether the solution focuses on back-end, front-end, full stack, or mobile.
- Reasoning behind your technical choices, including architecture.
- Trade-offs you might have made, anything you left out, or what you might do differently if you were to spend additional time on the project.
- Link to the hosted application (where applicable).
This will give us insight into how you approached the challenge.
When you're done, please deploy your project to Heroku. You may deploy to another service (such as AWS), but please include your reasoning behind this choice. Afterward, send a link to your repo. If you have chosen to make your repo private, please add forgingdestiny as an admin so we can see your work.
If you have existing code that you would like to share, please follow these guidelines:
- Include a link to the repository in the README file that is part of your coding challenge submission
- A description of what the code does
- If the repository has multiple contributors, please highlight the parts for which you were responsible