I chose the Food Trucks project for this coding challenge. The project was something I'd love to see locally. Raleigh-Durham has dozens of food trucks but no reliable way to find food trucks. The twitter feeds and websites are somewhat inaccurate.
I wrote both a back-end and a very light front-end for this project. The back-end is a WCF REST Service hosted on Microsoft Azure. One of my previous roles was in a startup company that commoditized Web services. When Microsoft WCF rolled around we weren't able to adapt it because it broke a lot of our Gateway infrastructure. I never got a chance to try it, and I've never used Azure before.. the process of hosting it was surprisingly smooth!
On the front-end, I have a broad but shallow depth of experience. I like to build toward usability and simplicity but feel like I'm missing a few things. I'm still coming up to speed with best practices, and have a little experience with IIFEs and creating modules, but had to settle after some issues.
There's a lot of tradeoffs on the front-end. I chose the Google map mashup, along with a list of data and some presets. The map is a nice way of visualizing nearby trucks and the drag-and-drop is nice, but is less elegant for mobile devices. Dragging, clicking, and zooming on a map is a bit more difficult on-the-go, and a lot more care needs to go into increasing the usability.
I'd love to spend more time looking at the front-end, and seeing what's practical and what isn't. Another thing that would help is having experience living in San Francisco - I am taking a lot of wild guesses at what users may want, or how they'd use it, and guesswork tends to lead to shaky user experience.
Thanks for reading! My resume can be seen on Google Drive: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e9dgARcGyzdJQKvyflOtPMG1Sx5-Bz8vcrHFka774nA/edit?usp=sharing