backend-developer-tests

Backend Developer Tests

These are my answers / implementations of the backend development tests over at StackPath

Unit Testing

I updated the implementation at unit-testing/pkg/fizzbuzz.go to account for negative inputs passed into each of the input arguments. In this case negatives are still treated as valid steps to print Fizz or Buzz since the remainder would still be 0.

I have added tests in the unit-testing/pkg/fizzbuzz_test.go file to have coverage over these inputs and many more. Running go test -v -cover ./... in the unit-testing directory will produce successful results.

Optional improvements could be to have more of a table based testing structure similar to a parameterized test in Java.

Web Services

The code in the rest-service directory creates a web service with the following responses:

• Respond with JSON output
• Respond to GET /people with a 200 OK response containing all people in the system
• Respond to GET /people/:id with a 200 OK response containing the requested person or a 404 Not Found response if the :id doesn't exist
• Respond to GET /people?first_name=:first_name&last_name=:last_name with a 200 OK response containing the people with that first and last name or an empty array if no people were found
• Respond to GET /people?phone_number=:phone_number with a 200 OK response containing the people with that phone number or an empty array if no people were found

The REST service has been implemeted with the go std lib.

I have included a Makefile so I can run make test to run commands to perform manual testing to get the desired responses above and some other edge cases. In order to have the tests run successfully the server should be started by running go run main.go from the rest-service directory.

An assumption I made was that if query params are passed outside of the ones listed above the response will produce no results. In this case we are not exposing any extra unintended behavior when a client tries to query by params not listed in the spec.

Input Processing

The input-processing directory has an implementation that takes STDIN as a named pipe and outputs every line that contains the word "error" to STDOUT.

The file has two implementations by running go run main.go for a quick and dirty approach or a go run main.go -e for a more efficient implementation. The second approach works better for large streams without \n characters and doesn't put everything into memory. It performs very well for these situations but for a file with many new lines that is very large the runtime can suffer.

The program also contains a pprof profiler for cpu and memory utilization that I used for trying to optimize the runtime of the program. I included a Makefile with a few recipies for building the application from a Dockerfile and creating an input file of 5GB. I used the containerized version of the application to test out implementations with memory restrictions to verify the performance of the application.

I also have some simple tests that I ran with the test.sh script and the input_files directory to be able to make sure when I made changes to the source code that I was not breaking functionality.