Alpine IQ Take Home

Overview

This exercise demonstrates how you solve problems using idiomatic go.

Rules

• Keep It Confidential: Please keep this document, the problem, and your solution confidential even after leaving the interview.
• 48-hour Time Limit: This should be a relatively short but fun exercise to show off your knowledge about go and general software engineering principles. Unless otherwise arranged, complete handoff to Alpine IQ within 48 hours.
• Use Generally Available Tools: The team evaluates new releases of tools and technologies as they become available, however for this exercise, please only use the latest version of tools and technologies that are considered Generally Available.
• Open Documentation, Open Internet: Engineers spend a non-trivial amount of time sourcing information online; feel free to use online resources and be able to demonstrate why you selected one approach to solving a problem over another
• Deliver a Complete Project: We want to be able to run your solution on our machines using the test cases you write.
• Intentionally Ambiguous: We want to see your approach to the problem and what decisions you make.

Technical Objectives

• Implement your solution using a current, released version of Go
• Do not use 3rd party libraries. Use only the core, standard library
• Must include unit tests to verify your components and include these tests in your solution
• Do not include a graphical user interface of any kind. The quality of code is evaluated only
• We are looking for a clean, well-factored, idiomatic codebase that has accompanying unit tests
• Include judicious comments that would be helpful to a fellow team member that has to review or work in your code.

Problem

At Alpine IQ we look at contacts ingested from many different sources for a client. We try to find key points of similarity in those contacts to see if we can find any that are being duplicated across different sources; then we merge those records together. For example, a client may have two different CRM systems and want to see if any contacts exist in both systems and can be merged together.

You need to write a library that will perform this merging process.

Requirements

1. Once the merge is completed, we should have visbility into what contacts were merged.
2. Contacts within a single platform should be merged before looking at contacts from other platforms.

Examples

1

	A	B	C
phone	2135550100	4155550199	2135550100
email		[email protected]
state id
platform	CRM 1	POS1	CRM 1

2

	A	B	C
phone	2135550100	4155550199	2135550100
email	[email protected]	[email protected]	[email protected]
state id	A0001	A0001	A0001
platform	CRM 1	CRM 2	CRM 3

3

	A	B	C
phone		4155550199	2135550100
email
state id	A0001
platform	CRM 1	CRM 2	CRM 3