Project Title

KOA Senior Python Engineer Assessment

Approach

To solve the task of finding the closest points among a set of points on a grid, the following approach was taken:

Receiving and Parsing Input: The Django application's API endpoint receives a set of points as semicolon-separated values. The input is parsed to extract individual point coordinates.

Calculating Euclidean Distance: The Euclidean distance formula is used to calculate the distance between each pair of points. The formula is applied as follows for two points with coordinates (x1, y1) and (x2, y2):

Distance = sqrt((x2 - x1)^2 + (y2 - y1)^2)

By calculating the distances between all pairs of points, we obtain a matrix of distances.

Identifying Closest Points: From the distance matrix, the points with the smallest distances are identified as the closest points. For each point, the algorithm finds the point(s) with the minimum distance.

Storing Data: The received set of points and the corresponding closest points are stored in a database using Django's ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) system. A suitable database model is defined to store the point coordinates and their closest points.

By utilizing the Euclidean distance formula, the algorithm determines the closest points among the provided set. The resulting pairs of closest points are then stored in the database for future retrieval and analysis.

Assumptions

The input points are in a two-dimensional grid system. The input points are in a specific format of semicolon-separated values. The points are to be stored in a MySQL database using Django's default ORM.

API Reference

The API uses JWT Authentication. Each request needs to be appended with a valid user token in the headers.

Get all closest points inserted to dB

  GET /api/closest-points

Check closest points

  POST /api/closest-points

Parameter	Type	Description
`points`	`string`	Required.A semi-colon list of grid pair coordinates

GET API Token

  POST /api/token

Parameter	Type	Description
`username`	`string`	Required.A valid username
`password`	`string`	Required.A valid password

Run Locally

Clone the project

  git clone repo-url

Go to the project directory

  cd my-project

Setup Virtual Environment

  python -m venv /path/to/new/virtual/environment

  source venv_name/bin/activate

Install Dependencies to Virtual Environment

    pip install -r requirements.txt

Setup Database Create a database in your local MySQL Environment Add the database connections credentials to koapi.settings.py under DATABASES = {}

Run DB migrations

   python manage.py migrate

Create Super User

   python manage.py createsuperuser

Start the server

  python manage.py runserver

Tech Stack

Client: HTML, Javascript, Bootstrap CSS

API Server: Python, Django, MySQL

Testing

You can test the API in 2 different ways

Running the unit tests

  python manage.py test

Use a tool like cURL, Postman, or any HTTP client library to send requests to the API endpoints If you are using Postman, import the Koa.postman_collection.json file to get started

Developed by,

Gitonga Mwaura - 2023

mwauragitonga / koaapi