Greetings and salutations!
Thanks for your interest in joining the team here at Roomkey. Part of our evaluation process is to set an open-ended challenge which will allow you to flex your creative muscles and give you an opportunity to demonstrate your coding skills. We think (and hope you agree) that this is better than asking you to scribble algorithms on a whiteboard in an interview setting.
We realize that this represents a significant investment of effort, but one we hope will be worthwhile for both you and us. Even if your application to Room Key is ultimately unsuccessful, you are more than welcome to use what you produce for this challenge in your personal portfolio.
If you are successful then we'll invite you to our offices for a face-to-face interview and will use what you produce for this challenge as a starting point for our chat.
Cheers! The Roomkey Team
We have created a simple NodeJS application which:
- Bundles your source code and serves it through http://localhost:3000/
- Provides mock data through http://localhost:3000/api/
- Provides live data through http://localhost:3000/ by proxying JSON requests to our live servers
Your challenge is to build something interesting that makes use of either the mock or live data provided. If you're more interested in UI/UX development, you might want to use the mock data. It will get you up and running faster. If reverse-engineering and data manipulation is more your thing, consider taking a stab at using our live data. See the API section below for more details.
You can choose whichever technologies you like to create this application. Feel free to make changes to any of the files in this repository, or to swap out any of the technologies we've provided. It's your party. 😎
- You will need a basic understanding of Git source control management
- You will need a GitHub account
- NodeJS should be installed on your machine
- You will need to be familiar with making data requests in web applications
- Fork this repository to your GitHub account
- Clone your fork to your development machine
- Install the package dependencies by running
npm install(oryarnif you prefer) - Start the application server by running
npm start - Open your browser to http://localhost:3000
Email us once you have finished and send us the URL to your fork of this repository. If you are not already in contact with one of us, you can send your email to [email protected].
If your fork is not publicly available, just let us know and we will send you the GitHub users you can give direct access. Feel free to create a throwaway GitHub account if you are worried about others seeing that you are working on your Room Key project.
We realize that there is no way to complete a fully polished application for the purposes of a code challenge. You have other stuff going on in your life, so focus on the things that best demonstrate your skill and passion. If you are more comfortable in the user interface, then concentrate there. If you like working deeper in the code, then concentrate there and don't worry so much about making a pretty UI.
You are encouraged to include some notes about the aspects you didn't get time to complete and how you would plan to further develop/improve the application given more time. Please include them in this readme rather than in an email so that others can see them when we share your work internally.
We are looking for creativity, originality, and a good user experience in your application if that's an area you focused on.
We are looking for readability, good architectural decisions, modularity, and a solid approach to testing in your code.
Congratulations! You get bonus points! Email us or submit a GitHub issue (or even better, a pull request) and we'll get it fixed. Suggestions to improve this code challenge are also very welcome.
This NodeJS application provides two ways of requesting data, and you can choose whichever works best for you. It all depends on where you get your kicks.
The Mock API is served through http://localhost:3000/api/. You might want to use this if you're interested in UI/UX development. It's the fastest way to get usable data on the screen, and does not require an internet connection. The available endpoints are documented below.
The Live API is served through http://localhost:3000/ when explicitly requesting JSON data. These requests are proxied to https://www.roomkey.com. There is intentionally very little documentation provided for this method as figuring it out is part of the fun. If this sound horrible, don't worry. It's provided for those enjoy a particular brand of pain. More details and an example are provided below.
The mock data API is available through http://localhost:3000/api/, which is
proxied to an express server running on port 3001 that serves the contents of
the data/ folder. You can make HTTP GET requests against the following endpoints:
Returns an array of locations that can be searched for hotels. For the purposes of this challenge there are only 3 locations available.
Returns an object representing the location with the given :locationId.
For example:
http://localhost:3000/api/locations/charlottesville/
Returns an array of hotels contained within the location. Two querystring
parameters are required: checkin and checkout both of which should be
provided in yyyy-mm-dd format.
For example:
http://localhost:3000/api/locations/charlottesville/hotels?checkin=2016-05-02&checkout=2016-05-04
These date parameters determine the hotel's rate and availability (see the
nightly_rate and available values). If they change, then the rates and
availability will change too, again to simulate the dynamic nature of hotel
pricing and availability in a real-world application.
Similar to /api/locations/:locationId/hotels, but returns only a single hotel
object for the :hotelId given.
For Example:
http://localhost:3000/api/locations/charlottesville/hotels/0ZEzgGG4W04s8EP05g9krVMw?checkin=2015-05-02&checkout=2015-05-04
The live data API gives you richer, live data coming directly from our production website. It works by proxying all JSON requests to https://www.roomkey.com.
For example:
fetch('/locations/0nN94iG4S04s5cO05g9krVMw/hotels', {headers: {Accept: 'application/json'}})
.then(function(res) { return res.json() })
.then(console.log)
This creates a GET request of type application/json against
http://localhost:3000/locations/0nN94iG4S04s5cO05g9krVMw/hotels which is in turn
proxied to https://www.roomkey.com/locations/0nN94iG4S04s5cO05g9krVMw/hotels.
Note how visiting the second of those URLs in the browser returns the actual HTML
for a search page results instead of the desired JSON data. This is because you
have to explicitly ask for JSON with the Accept:application/json request header.
Check out the webpack.config.js file and you'll see the proxy rules.
We're intentionally leaving the actual endpoints for live data undocumented for this code challenge. Don't worry if this doesn't sound like fun or just isn't your thing. Otherwise, head to https://www.roomkey.com and poke around under the covers.
Happy hunting.
Building image paths for the live api can use the following pattern:
const imageUrl = `https://d29u3c1wxehloe.cloudfront.net${photo.id}/[200x150|500x375|big].jpg`
This project is MIT licensed. This means that you are allowed to freely use this for your personal portfolio.