ihsw / app-ws

Application Developer Work Sample

Work sample to be completed to apply for the application developer position at Compose.

Context

At Compose, we have multiple apps being served on the app.compose.io domain. These apps all use the same basic CSS and JavaScript through a UI framework we built called Megatron.

The app in this repository is a Rails app which only serves a few routes. That's similar to our reality at Compose, where apps are specialized.

To test your abilities, we've created a very incomplete app which has the responsibility of exposing a UI to our users for browsing their PostgreSQL deployment.

We use appropriately-sized services to expose our data to our various apps. To simulate this condition, we created a small service (hosted at:https://compose-dummy-api.herokuapp.com/) which provides basic account details and deployment information. All of this is fake and modeled to work with this app.

Setup

Required software

• Ruby >= 2.1
• Bundler
• PostreSQL >= 9.4(postgres and initdb should be available in your PATH)

Environment variables

We use "rbenv-vars" (a rbenv plugin) in development to apply environment variables present in the .rbenv-vars file. You may want to EXPORT those manually if you don't use "rbenv-vars"

Initializing a database

Use PostgreSQL's initdb executable to initialize a database in a directory (within this app's cwd) like so:

initdb -D pg_data

Starting up

Using foreman (or forego), you can start both the postgres process and the rails server process.

foreman start

Seeding the data

Make sure you've started your PostgreSQL instance by running the aforementioned foreman command. Then:

make seed

Accessing stuff

I'm sure you can figure that out from the Procfile / server logs.

About this app's structure and tooling

gem 'megatron'

This is our own UI kit / framework for consistent styles across all our apps. The source is here: compose-ui/megatron.rb

You can find some incomplete docs over here: https://megatron-docs.compose.io/

class Deployment

... is our main model from which other deployment types are inheriting (like PostgreSQL::Deployment.) It handles creating basic client connections, it knows about the connection details, etc.

What's expected of you

As a general rule, you should use idiomatic Rails to solve these problems. This could mean reorganizing things and probably means adding routes, controllers and models as you feel is necessary.

Use the tools, gems and libraries you enjoy using.

Aesthetics

Your presentation should be something you're proud of. The user-experience and aesthetic aspects should be well considered.

We have no expectations toward how something should look, but we do expect it to look good and feel natural.

Test: Specs need to pass

We've added a few failing specs in the app, please fix them and make them green.

This means writing code in the application, the specs are correct but the code to make them pass is not yet implemented.

Feature: DESCRIBE-like for PostgreSQL tables

• Clicking on a table's name should bring up a page with all columns and their data types for the selected table. This should actually query the PostgreSQL deployment for the information, no fake data.
• In addition to creating the actual feature. It should be tested.

Feature: Current queries

• Show a deployment's current queries
• It should be live updating

Feature: Tables with the same name in different schemas

In PostgreSQL, tables might have the same name but belong to different schemas.

Navigating to these tables, with the current implementation, does not work and raises an exception like:

ERROR: relation "table_name" does not exist

Fix this by appropriately displaying and using the schema in the UI and paths.