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Antonio's Cats Home

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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Exercise statement
  3. Comparison between implementations
  4. How to best understand my skills with the test

Introduction

Antonio's Cats Home is a skills' demonstration exercise where I implement the same web project with multiple front-end technologies:

Visually the implementations are identical. Under the hood there are important differences. These implementations solve common front-end problems like model/scope/state creation, routing and transitions based on component states. All three implementations are Single-page Applications (SPAs). They have been developed following a TDD approach.

This project is intended to help recruiters and hiring IT managers when time comes to assess my coding skills.

I also use these implementations as best-practices reference and skeleton code base for new projects. None of the three implementations use boilerplate projects for its creation. They have been coded from scratch.

Exercise statement

The starting point is the below mockup:

Given I am only provided with the above mockup representing a common use case, four images of cats and a JSON file containing a list of cat names and descriptions:

  • A web GUI has to be implemented to show a list of cats which are available for adopting from the local cats shelter "Antonio's Cats Home".

  • The interface must contain an input text field that when typing on it it will filter cats' cards out.

  • On the JSON feed the cats won't be ordered by name, but when shown on screen they will need to be sorted alphabetically.

  • A card at a time can be selected. There must be some visual hint to distinguish the selected card.

  • The GUI must be also responsive and adapt to mobile devices. An attractive design is a plus.

Comparison between implementations

On the below table you can see technical differences between implementations (SCROLL RIGHT TO SEE THE REST OF THE TABLE):

Implementation JS (Kb minified) CSS (Kb minified) JS imports CSS imports Front-end framework HTTP requests Routing List transitions Other relevant libraries CSS framework Building tools Linting Tests Server-side rendering Server Readme file Ready out of the box
Vanilla ES5 JavaScript 2 5 1 1 (plus fonts) - (HTML strings with insertAdjacentHTML) XMLHttpRequest - - - Less using BEM npm, Gulp JSHint, HTMLLint, lesshint Jasmine on PhantomJS ❌ Node.js HTML On dist folder
AngularJS 233 5 1 1 (plus fonts) AngularJS 1.7 (directive) $http UI-Router ngAnimate - Less using BEM npm, Gulp JSHint, HTMLLint, lesshint Jasmine on PhantomJS ❌ Node.js HTML On dist folder
React (Babel) 255 - (no native CSS) 1 0 (plus fonts) React 16.7 Axios React Router ReactTransitionGroup Redux, Reselect styled-components using BEM npm, Gulp, Rollup ESLint, stylelint Jest on Node.js ✔️ Node.js HTML On dist folder
React (TypeScript) 260 - (no native CSS) 1 0 (plus fonts) React 16.7 Axios React Router ReactTransitionGroup Redux, Reselect styled-components using BEM npm, Gulp, Rollup TSLint, stylelint Jest on Node.js ✔️ Node.js HTML On dist folder

How to best understand my skills with the test

There are a few points where attention can be paid to find out how good the exercise is and assess my programming skills. The implementations contain a set of general technologies, software patterns and best practices normally used on front-end software development.

We can check:

  • Code simplicity: there must be a balance between the number of technologies used to showcase skills and the real need and number of requirements in order to avoid feature overload. The balance pursued is quality over quantity. A couple of features well implemented counts more than five features poorly implemented (KISS principle). On the test statement there are no explicit instructions about libraries or features to be used. This gives freedom of choice at the same time interviewers have less scripted results.
  • Front-end framework: when using a front-end framework like Angular or React I try to do the best use of them according to its official documentation. Each of these frameworks are a world by themselves and getting used to its opinionated patterns, component life cycles and complex APIs has a learning curve. A pure JavaScript approach shows how basics are not forgotten.
  • Animations: GUI animations are a must-have in modern front-end development. They add user flow continuity and provide extra feedback about the GUI expected behaviour. There are three basic ways animations can be added to HTML elements: with CSS transitions, with CSS animation keyframes and with JavaScript by changing DOM element properties. There are JavaScript libraries with which animations can be implemented. But under the hood they make use of the aforementioned animation techniques. For the use cases of this project a not so good way to add animations would be by using a library like jQuery.animate() or by using CSS animation keyframes.
  • Folder structure: a folder structure organises files in a way it is easy to find files as the project grows in size. Roughly files can be arranged by type or by concern. Often front-end libraries have its own folder structure guidelines. For Angular this is a good guideline. A general approach would be the below one. Source code must be separated from distributable/built code.
    root
      dist
      src
        assets
          images
          fonts
        components
        data
        style
      tests
  • Readme file: a readme file with explanations and instructions must be always present in the root folder. A lack of this file makes harder for interviewers to understand a candidate test.
  • Technical tricks and traps: on the tests the code will provide tips about the candidate seniority level:
    • Many CSS and/or JavaScript imports in the final distributable index.htm file: increases number of HTTP calls and page weight affecting execution performance and loading time.
    • Lack of use of semantic HTML elements: in addition to <div>s and <span>s, elements like <header>, <footer>, <section>, or <article> should be used.
    • Many temporarary/unneeded files created with a boilerplate project: the use of a generator or a reference project is a good starting base as long as the rest of not used files are removed and the files used are cleaned out from unused code.
    • Conversion of SVG images to png: common mistake. There is no need to convert SVG to png. Even old versions of Internet Explorer support SVG. Doing so the vectorial nature of SVG is lost.

Extra information

Don't forget to have a look at the rest of my GitHub repo. My website is always open for business on antonioredondo.com. And its source code is available on GitHub. A good place to learn about my coding skills.