/floaty_takehome

Simple example django app

Primary LanguagePython

Question history mockup

Overview

This is a simple proof-of-concept web service that:

  • Lets you create questions which can be answered by users
  • Lets you edit existing questions
  • Tracks question change history so you view changes across time

It may or may not have been created and published here as part of a job interview.

To avoid unneccesary re-invention of wheels, I used django with the django-simple-history package to handle the guts of the history tracking.

The project took approximately 11 hours to complete (see "Challenges" below).

Demo

  1. Copy/paste the following into a shell running bash on a system with django and python3 installed:

    ( set -xe   # be verbose, stop if any command fails
git clone https://github.com/usernamenumber/floaty_takehome -b initialwork
cd floaty_takehome
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 manage.py migrate
python3 manage.py loaddata fixtures/demo.json
python3 manage.py runserver
)

  2. Point your browser at http://localhost:8000

  3. You should see a pre-populated question. Click the History link to see its revisions.

  4. (optional) Add your own questions and revisions

  5. (optional) Go to http://localhost:8000/admin/chatbot/answer/add/ (login admin:admin) to add answers, albeit via an awkward auto-generated interface

Notes

Challenges

I haven't used django in many years, so probably 50% of the time spent on this project was (re-)reading documentation to get back up to speed (some big things have changed - they have migrations built-in now!!).

The part of the project that went through the most revision was probably the code that became chatbot/templatetags/diff_filter.py, not because of the code its self, which was easy enough to base on the difflib SequenceMatcher docs, but because I couldn't settle on where it made the most sense to put it. At first it was a method on the HistoricalQuestion model, but I didn't like having a model output HTML. I then moved it to a helper function in chatbot.util (which no longer exists), but that just obfustaced the problem rather than moving the HTML to the presentation layer. I settled on creating a custom filter, though I dislike that that solution required creating an awkward previous_and_current_text on the Model to get content for the filter.

Succcesses

Despite the learning curve, I'm happy with the result. Thanks to SequenceMatcher I was able to make a much fanicer diff than I thought I would, and even had time to add some styling. I think I made the right call by not implementing the history tracking myself.

What I would have done with more time

Lots, but off the top of my head...

  • Docstrings!
  • Tests!
  • Look for more opportunities to save work by using pre-existing django packages like the django REST framework
  • Consolidate views, i.e. add the question_create form to the bottom of the question_list view.
  • Add a non-admin interface for answering questions
  • Add support for tagging questions, and maybe answers, with arbitrary metadata