Sav Programming Challenge ReadMe

Recent Programming Challenge a company asked me to complete, this was the prompt given:

At 12:00am each morning you are giving a list of timestamps for that day separated by a comma. Some timestamps may be different and some may be at the same time. Please write a Python script that sends an API call at each of the timestamps, accurate down to the second. If multiple timestamps are at the same time, the API calls must be sent at the same time. List of Times for a Given Day (24hr Hour:Minutes:Seconds): 09:15:25,11:58:23,13:45:09,13:45:09,13:45:09,17:22:00,17:22:00 API Call to Send GET request to "ifconfig.co" Please send a Zip file that contains the python code and a readme on how to execute. You can import any native python packages (ex: datetime, urllib, etc...) you need but no 3rd party packages.

How To Run the Script

The first thing to mention is that to be able to run the script, you must have Python installed on your system. Once you have confirmed its installation, you can download the zip file and extract the files using your favorite unzipping program. Once this is done there are two ways that you can choose to run the script. The first is to open the project in a Python IDE of your choice and set the configuration to the main.py script. From there, you can easily run the program by hitting the run button. If you don't have any Python IDEs installed, you can go to the Command Prompt on Windows, or the Apple/Linux equivalent, and cd to where the files were extracted, specifically the SavAPIProject folder. From here all you need to type is "python main.py" and hit enter, starting the program.

Design Choices

While not required, I did want to talk about some specific design choices I made in my three methods to reduce CPU time. The first method, generateTimeList, is simply used to replicate the sorted Time List that the problem describes. The second method, convertListtoDict, converts the given List and makes it into a multilayered Dict with a Dict holding the hour and minute values and a List holding the second values due to the need to get a count of the second instances later. I chose to do this because Dicts are more time efficient than Lists and the time taken to convert the List into a Dict would be worth it considering the amount of times I would need to access the Times later. In the third method, sendCalls, I knew from the beginning that it would need a pseudo-continually running while loop, but that sort of implementation is very costly. So I therefore decided to have the program sleep until it hit certain thresholds. For example, say the current time was 10:00:00 and the next time in the list is 11:18:27, I would have the method recognize that the next time isn't until hour 11, and therefore have the program sleep until 11:00:00. This was similarly done for both minutes and seconds, reducing the CPU usage of the method.