GitIssues

3-hour project to show issues and comments on a GitHub repo.

The assignment

• present all the "issues' for the public Stevia repo: https://github.com/freshOS/Stevia/issues
• allow user to select an issue and present all the comments from that selected issue
• Github's REST documentation for "issues" is here: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/issues#list-repository-issues

What I prioritized

• Basic MVP functionality without bugs
  • Page 1 of all issues (both open and closed) load in the background with no impact to the UI thread]
  • Issue rows can be selected, displaying a detail view with all comments for that issue
• A UI that should feel somewhat familiar to users of GitHub Issues on the browser
  • The body of the issue itself is presented as a "comment" at the top of the detail view, before all other comments loaded from the comments_url
• Concise, legible, clean code
• Fast iteration
• A functional dynamic layout that doesn't truncate any text
• Proper text formatting
• Pull-to-refresh on all views

What could be improved with more time

• Architectural "finesse" (separate view models and data sources, moving some stuff out of the VCs) - I was more focused on getting the app done fast
• Error handling: it's currently just print statements, and I don't use Result at all. An error looks the same as an empty response.
• Differentiating between "closed" and "merged" issues
• Adding images such as avatars, icons, etc.
• Unit tests
• Avoiding extraneous network fetches by using a data store such as Core Data for larger datasets
• Use of more modern SDK features like async/await and SwiftUI or DiffableDataSource (I'm still fastest at old-fashioned UIKit)

Where I stopped

I was in the process of getting pagination working; as of now, the main branch only returns the first 30 issues in the repo, and only the first 30 comments per issue. The issue I was having with this API is that it doesn't give you a total issue count in the response, so it makes it a bit trickier to get it right in the last ~20 minutes before time expired.

I put my work in progress on pagination in a separate pagination feature branch. It's only implemented on the IssuesViewController for now, not the CommentsViewController. I believe I just had to get the row count calculation correct so it would refetch the next page. I would have preferred to fix the bug, clean up the code more, and move some of the logic out of the VC and data models, before submitting this as a PR.