In order to evaluate your stengths as a developer, we are requesting you complete a brief take-home code challenge that involves some work on the full web stack. We expect this to take 2 to 4 hours of your time. After developing your solution, please submit a Pull Request on Github and we will discuss your code on a screenshare at the next interview.
Hacker News is a well-known technology news aggregator service and forum maintained by seed stage investment firm, Y-Combinator. Via Firebase, Y-Combinator provides a simple JSON API to retrieve story information. The API requires no authentication and is documented in a GitHub repo. The two most useful API calls are:
Suppose you have a small team of developers who all regularly browse Hacker News for industry insights. This team would like a simple way to flag articles that could be of interest to other team members and publish that list out to the rest of the team. This UI would be deployed for internal use so it would not require a public sign up but would be pre-populated with users who will be team members.
When a team member signs in, they will see recent news stories and be able to star, flag, highlight, or otherwise mark a story as interesting. A separate list should display all the stories that were deemed interesting and the name of the person who marked it so.
- Users should sign in. We have created a User model for you and pre-populated it with several users.
- Users should come to a page and see a list of current top Hacker News stories.
- This list does not necessarily need to be the current live list, but it should be a recent and continuously updated list.
- The number of stories displayed is up to you.
- The user should be able to star a story. The mechanism and display is up to you: flag, star, upvote, pick, etc. The UX is your choice.
- The stories chosen by the team members should display. It can be a separate page or the same page, the choice is yours.
- Each story should show the name of the team member or members who flagged it.
- As an internal tool for a small team, performance optimization is not a requirement.
- Be prepared to discuss known performance shortcomings of your solution and potential improvements.
- UX design here is of little importance. The design can be minimal or it can have zero design at all.