Badi Coding Challenge - Backend (Ruby on Rails)

Technical choices for this project at the bottom of the page.

The context

You are a scientist in a post-apocalyptic world. In your lab you have plenty of human tissues, yet not so many brains. For this reason, you decide to create zombies, which you then equip with armors and weapons. Why would you do that? Well, we cannot tell you. The only thing you need to know is that you are a crazy scientist playing on the edge of life and death.

Instructions

• Fork this repo and clone your fork in your local machine;
• The challenge is on! Implement the 6 steps described below;
• Create a pull request.

What we expect

• Build a performant, clean and well structured solution;
• Commit early and often. We want to be able to check your progress;
• Feel free to address the problem creatively according to your programming tastes (there are always multiple ways to achieve the same goal) and try to use elegant solutions.

The Challenge

Create a fully-working API that allows to perform the following operations:

1. Create Zombies. Each zombie can have weapons and armors;
2. Update a Zombie's attributes, including (but not limited to) weapons and armors;
3. Search Zombies according to their attributes, weapons and armors;
4. Destroy a Zombie;
5. Make your API public. Deploy it using the service of your choice (e.g. AWS, Heroku, Digital Ocean...);
6. Create a Readme file including a short explanation of your technical choices and (if you wish) ideas and suggestions.

Too easy? Great, we think so too! That's why we encourage candidates to go the extra mile and impress us in any way they deem appropriate (as long as it is related to this challenge ;).

Happy coding!

Recommendations

We highly recommend you to use Docker, this project is already setup to do so. Just run docker-compose up -d && docker-compose logs -f and your api will be up & running with hot code reloading on http://localhost:3000.

In case you want to clean your environment, run again:

docker-compose down -f
docker-compose up -d --build
docker-compose logs -f

About Badi

Badi is a startup based in Barcelona (Spain) which offers a two-sided marketplace for shared flats and roommates (mobile and web app). Our goal is making city living affordable for everyone by unlocking available rooms inside crowded urban areas. How? By offering the best marketplace that intelligently matches verified profiles without intermediaries. Do you want to join our tech team as a backend engineer? Accept our challenge and impress us :)

Technical Choices

Before I started the project I made a representative plot of the relationship between Zombies, Armors, Weapons, and the Zombie_Armors/Zombie/Wepaons tables, as you can see here:

Creating the Zombie Controller

• Create a new folder under "app/controllers/api/v1" for API versioning;
• New file base_controller.rb so the app could be used as an api;
• New file zombies_controller to manage the basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) tasks of the challenge;
• The results would be loaded in a json format, since there's no graphic parts on the app, only the API;
• Make sure the "config/routes.rb" was calling the right controller and tasks from Zombies;
• Now I'm able to create, update, and destroy a zombie.

Building the relationships

• Since I already had all the models, I had to set the relationship between Zombies and Armors, to make sure a zombie could have many armors and/or many weapons;
• Based on my plot, the relationship between Zombies and Armors/Weapons go through the Zombie_Armors/Zombie_Weapons table
• Set the realtionships by adding 'has_many' calls in the Zombie, Armor, and Weapon models;
• Along with stablishing the connections, I also added the validations for each model to make sure the Zombies, Armors, and Weapons follow the attributes set on "db/schema.rb".

Testing the API

• Tested the API on Postman to make sure I could add weapons, armors, and create and update zombies. The API seems to be working and the results come in json so it can be seen in an browser.

Challenges

• I still have to implement a search engine to the app. I'm more used to work with a PostgreSQL database, so I'm still figuring out how to work on a MySQL database;
• It's my first time working with Docker, containers and Docker + MySQL, so I had to do some digging on how to connect those two. The docker server is now working fine;
• Pushing the app to Heroku will be trickier than I imagined because Heroku prefers to use PostgreSQL insead of MySQL. There are some add-ons such as ClearDB that I can use.