GitHubUsers

This is my submission for Circle's Senior iOS Engineer take-home assignment.

Table of Contents

1. Objective
2. Feature List
3. Encountered XCode 13 Beta Bugs
4. Remarks

Objective

The goal of the assignment was to implement an app to search for GitHub users using the GitHub Search API. The app was successfully implemented natively in SwiftUI (iOS 15) in Xcode 13 Beta 5 without any third-party dependencies. The full feature list and implementation details can be found in the Feature List section below. It cannot be guaranteed that this app will work as expected on other versions of the Xcode 13 beta. Furthermore, I wanted to implement unit & UI testing for the app, and while I began, I unfortunately was not able to complete it on time for the deadline as my focus was on refining the app architecture.

Feature List

My submission was completed with all of the base and bonus requirements.

Feature	Implementation	Feature Type
List users	Relevant users are listed upon search	Base
Search users	Users can be searched for in the native navigation search bar	Base
Paginate search results	results are automatically and seamlessly appended to the list when end of list is reached	Base
Pull-to-refresh	Native pull-to-refresh implementation above the navigation bar	Base
Search results sorting	A navigation button will present a sheet with search parameter modifications	Bonus
Progress indication as redacted views	User row views are redacted while they are being fetched & loaded in. However, it is possible to miss the redacted views if your internet connection is fast enough	Bonus
Architecture with reusability in mind	MVVM architecture was used to separate the model, networking (view model), and view layers. Thus, they can be independently modularized and reused as needed	Bonus

Xcode 13 Beta 5 Bugs

These are the notable bugs I've encountered while testing the app:

1. The alert for handling user-facing errors is an iOS 15 beta feature. The linked webpage states the following:

   If no actions are present, the system includes a standard “OK” action. No default cancel action is provided. If you want to show a cancel action, use a button with a role of cancel.

   While this is the intended behaviour, this is not accurate; whether an action is present or not, the alert always includes a default "Cancel" action. Thus, if you happen to run into the alert while testing the app, please select "OK" action I implemented as it triggers necessary code for the app.

2. For the same aforementioned alert, there has been a rare case of it triggering with empty text and excluding the button I have implemented. This is a bug as I have designed the code to only trigger the alert when the relevant error occurs. For the sake of argument, let's say there is a flaw in my error handling code, the button I implemented should still show as it is directly place within the alert initialization code, but it doesn't.

3. UITests seem to run indefinitely. Unsure what the cause is as I have not implemented any UI testing beyond the template code provided by Xcode.

4. And of course, any unexpected beta bugs

Remarks

This app was built over the span of three days between August 27-30, 2021. While I ultimately did not get the job, I had lots of fun building the app and am proud of the work I did. There is always room for improvement, and as such, on to the next one.