You have been asked to kick off a new native news app, initially consisting of just two screens
- The first screen will display a list of the headlines (fetched from a server - see below) and the last updated date
- When the user taps on a headline, the application then shows a second screen containing the headline and the last updated date again, as well as the introductory paragraph
The designer has asked that the typography be as follows:
| Components | Color | Font |
|---|---|---|
| headline | 0x000000 | large, bold, system font |
| last updated timestamp | 0x3d3d3d | normal, light, system font, |
| introduction | 0x000000 | normal, regular, system font |
The returned last updated timestamp is in epoch time but the design calls for this to be a human readable day, month and year. So, for example, it should show as "1 January 1970" for an epoch timestamp of 0.
A backend engineer in your team has made a first release of the API available for you to test with. The list of headlines, timestamps and introductions is available at
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bbc/news-apps-coding-challenge/master/headlines.json
The product manager has asked if you could also record some UI and network events as people use the app. This can be done by issuing fire and forget GET requests to https://github.com/bbc/news-apps-coding-challenge/blob/master/analytics
Event specific query parameters should be appended to the URL as follows:
UI Display Events
event=display– whenever a screen is shown (the headline or the article)screen=XXX- an identifier for the screen that was shown
Network Load Events
event=load– any network requesttime=xxx- the time (in ms) for the network request to complete
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bbc/news-apps-ios-coding-challenge/master/analytics?event=load&data=100
Ideally, the user should also be able to trigger a reload of the data from the server, using a pull to refresh action.
For iOS roles, you can write the app in either Swift or Objective-C.
For Android roles, please use Kotlin.
If you use third party libraries, please explain why. Avoid using large, app framework and architecture type libraries as this can obscure from us your understanding of the platform framework as well as good architecture and practices.
Remember we are looking for a demonstration of your skills - not perfection. If you don't have time to write the implementation, add a comment explaining what you would have done. If you see an improvement on your implementation, adding a comment is also useful.
We think this is likely to take a couple of evenings...please don't feel you have to spend more time on it than that. Again, comments about next steps will help us to understand your thought processes.
As this is an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of what modern app development looks like, we think it is only fair that we share some initial thoughts of our own. We believe that code readability, unit testing, separation of concerns, open/closed principle, error handling, and an intuitive, responsive, robust and reliable user interface combine to create a high quality end product.
You may find our playbook of use in guiding your development and decision making
https://github.com/bbc/news-weather-apps-playbook
- To submit your code, please create a private GitHub repo (it’s free) and share your code repo with our GitHub user, bbcnewsapps.
- Please note that we will be considering your git commit history during our evaluation.
- We recommend you state your build environment (e.g. SDK versions, IDE versions) so that we are able to match it when we look at your work.
- Under no circumstances make the repository public.
- Please email your BBC Careers contact separately as well to confirm your submission.