Php developer test

Test for Php developers that want to join our team

Introduction

Welcome! This is a small test that will help us to know you better as a developer.

The code provided is a real example of a working code just before the final refactor step. The moment when all tests go green, but you see that the resulting code is not as nice looking as you'd like. You probably know that people say that a regular coder stops when the code works, but a good developer stops when working code is clean, readable and maintenable.

So we want you to see take that step from regular coder to good developer to figure out how you think and work.

Getting started

We provide you a basic Vagrant machine configured so you only have to worry about the coding. Just clone the repository, fire up the Vagrant machine, and make and test your changes (or test and make your changes ;-) ).

If you need any clarification, or maybe find something wrong, just write an issue in this same repository.

The Lottery entity

The lottery entity it's a stripped down version of the real entity we work with. For the test, you only have to care about these fields: frequency and draw_time.

The public interface of the entity is composed mainly by two methods, one (getLastDrawDate) for getting the exact date and time of the most recent past draw, and another (getNextDrawDate) one for getting the next one.

As you can see, there's a big code smell in "duplicated" methods, that are almost exactly the same but change a few details. Making the smell go away is your main job.

draw_time

This field stores the hour when the draw is taking place. It's a string in format hh:mm:ss and it represents the UTC time.

frequency

This field tells us which days are the draws taking place. As you can guess by the name, it doesn't represent an actual date, but a frequency, and it can have the following formats:

• y1225: The draw takes place every year on december 25th
• m24: The draw takes place on 24th of each month
• w0100100: The draw takes place on tuesdays and fridays
• w0000001: The draw takes place on sundays
• d: The draw takes place every day.

Executing the tests

Ssh into the vagrant machine, cd /vagrant, and ./test.sh

What are we looking for

We want you to take the Lottery entity to its completion: refactor to reduce duplicity of code, change any variable naming that doesn't suit your style, introduce any design pattern you need to do (if you feel like it's needed), add any extra test case that may be missing, etc.

In short, own the code and improve it.

How to send your solution

Just do a pull request to the repository