Hi! 👋
Whether you have been sent here by one of our recruitment ninjas, or stumbled upon it by accident, we're excited you're here! We are the leading mobile innovation and app development company from Oslo, Norway. 🇳🇴 Nobody in Norway has delivered more apps than us!
This document describes one of the challenges for those interested in working with us. As you may have guessed, it revolves around mobile apps. 🎉
If you've stumbled upon this document and like what you're reading, but perhaps your CV is not polished yet, don't worry! You can jump straight into the challenge. Once done, refer to the The Handover to get in touch!
A client of ours has just discovered xkcd comics.
Disregarding the abundance of similar apps, she wants to create a comic viewer app, right now! She came up with a list of requirements, too! The user should be able to:
- browse through the comics,
- see the comic details, including its description,
- search for comics by the comic number as well as text,
- get the comic explanation
- favorite the comics, which would be available offline too,
- send comics to others,
- get notifications when a new comic is published,
- support multiple form factors.
Quite a list! 😱
Luckily, there are a few services available to ease some of the bullet points. There's the xkcd JSON API, which can be used to access the comics. Then there's xkcd search, which can help with the search. Finally, there's explain xkcd, which offers the explanation for all the comics.
Still, does she expect all this in the first iteration?
Given the amount of work, the client has agreed to an MVP, but only if our best engineer is involved.
This is where you come in! 🎉
Your task is to pick a few features you think are best suited for an MVP. The tech stack is completely up to you - use whichever language you're most comfortable with (we ❤️ Kotlin and Swift) and any third party libraries and tools you need to get the job done. Considering this is the MVP, your code should be architectured in a way that makes it easy to add and extend features.
Also, the client doesn't have a budget for a designer. She doesn't expect anything fancy, but she trusts you to come up with something reasonable.
She set the deadline to 3 days from your first commit but understands there are other things besides work. A quick note in a README file explaining the delay does the trick. For example:
Ran over the time limit as birthday celebrations for auntie Linda had to be had. 🍺
It's completely up to you to decide how to deliver the task. GitHub, Bitbucket or any other service that's easily accessible works great. You can also upload it to e.g. Google Drive or Dropbox if that's your cup of tea. Try to avoid email attachments though.
Once uploaded, please drop your contact person from Shortcut an email with the link to the task. If you haven't been in touch with us yet, simply use the generic post@shortcut.no email.
We really appreciate the time and effort it took to complete the task! ❤️ We promise to return the favor as best as we can.
Please include a README file with a quick and dirty description of your solution, the thought process, and any points you'd like to highlight. It will help us during the review, where we'll look at:
- your VCS history, with hopefully more than 1 commit,
- the project structure,
- the project architecture,
- good coding practices,
- consistent coding style and formatting,
- namings and naming conventions,
- good use of comments,
- lint warnings and code smells
- unit & integration tests
We don't like goodbyes, so why not stay in touch? Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. We also appreciate any feedback you may have regarding this coding assignment, good or bad. Send an email to post@shortcut.no and let us know how we're doing!
Takk for nå!
