Technical challenge checklist

tags

Programming Software Engineering

Having done quiet a lot of technical challenges, and having forgotten some details when submitting, I came up with a good checklist of things to check before submitting the technical test.

Must do checklist #

• Keep commit readable, check if the company has any commit format of their own in their public GitHub organization or their wiki page (if any), otherwise, use conventional commits
• Structure your commits so we can revert in case of any bug. Make your git history ready for production, see Personal git workflow
• Use well stable, known libraries
• Document your decisions of why, where and how
• Write tests for everything your write
• Run static code analysers and make sure there aren’t any undefined variables
• Benchmark what you wrote for validating algorithms/project
• Configure and use a linter

Technical project #

• Use environment variables for secrets, api urls, debugging and general configuration
• Enable application logging where needed
• Document reusable API functions
• Lock dependency versions
• Take some time to think of the project structure, create diagrams, check out related project’s structure
• Read and re-read the requirements, if you have any doubts, do ask the developers/human resources
• HTTP API? Run a stress test against your API
• Containerize your application
• Last but not least, have fun learning

Algorithms #

• Document algorithm decisions and steps
• Make algorithm comparison if possible
• Don’t over complicate. It’s not because it’s an algorithm that it requires to be unreadable
• Make sure the algorithm you are applying is well suited for the task
• Don’t panic, you are not supposed to know all algorithms out there, but you are supposed to know where to search and implement your findings

Bonus #

• Add CI integration (CircleCI, Travis, GitHub Workflow, etc)