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🐳 Pokeshake REST API

Pokemons described by Shakespeare. Did get to catcheth those folk all!

My response to a software engineering challenge.

To me, it was quite fun doing this challenge, I hope you'll have a good time looking at it!

✏️ The Task

Develop a REST API that, given a Pokemon name, returns its Shakespearean description.

☕ Technology stack

🧰 Prerequisites

You'll need Docker, Java 8 and Maven 3.5+ installed on your favourite OS.

🔗 Clone source code

git clone https://github.com/noragami/pokeshake.git
cd pokeshake

⚗️ Run tests

mvn clean verify

🎮 Run application

You can build/run the application packaged as JAR file via Maven and Java...

mvn clean package
java -jar target/pokeshake.jar

... or with Docker (it might take a while to download images the first time):

docker build -t pokeshake/0.0.1 .
docker run -p 8080:8080 pokeshake/0.0.1

🔨 Test application

curl http://localhost:8080/pokemon/pikachu

{"name":"pikachu","description":"At which hour several of these pokémon gather,  their electricity couldst buildeth and cause lightning storms."}

📝 Additional notes

🐛 Error handling

Shakespeare translator API has a quota limit on the free tier (60 API calls/day, 5 calls/hour). If you reach the quota limit, the API will send an http response code 429 - Too Many Requests. For this reason, I made the decision to forward the same http response code to the client, instead of failing badly with a 500 response code. So we can keep the information and provide the right feedback to the client.

I also implemented a 404 response code if the client requests a Pokemon that doesn't exist.

🔒 PokeApi 403 Forbidden error

I encountered a problem during the integration of PokeApi. At first, every call returned a 403 error.

Fun facts:

  1. API Documentation didn't help at all
  2. The same call worked using the browser

Point 2 made me think that the only difference between the browser call and the console call was the user-agent. By setting up a dummy user-agent, the problem disappeared.

💡 Improvement areas for production ready product

  • Document API using OpenAPI/Swagger (using Swagger UI)
  • Add a cache layer (all the requests are deterministic, same Pokemon name -> same Pokemon description, same description -> same Shakespeare description)
  • We'd need a premium/ultra Shakespeare translator API subscription
  • Add Spring Retry policy to automatically re-invoke a failed operation (on the integration side)
  • Add a circuit breaker to fail fast if all else fails
  • This is a single microservice, but in production you'll want a whole microservices ecosystem to scale the right way such as an api gateway/reverse proxy, a service locator, a config server...