Toy Robot Coding Challenge

Technical assessment challenge for job interview process

Build and Run with Microsoft Visual Studio

This solution/project was created with Visual Studio 2019. This has not been tested with other versions of Visual Studio

Open adamh-toy-robot.sln
Build (CTRL+SHIFT+B)
Run (F5)

By default the project has been configured to run without unit tests or from external file. To try these command line switches, open the project properties Configuration Properties->Debugging->Command Arguments and use the following flags

-run-unit-tests
-file ./file_data/sample_data.txt

Build and Run with GCC/G++

Pre-requisites

For the above to work correctly, the GCC compilers must be installed and pointed to by your system PATH

Build

Open a shell in the root of the cloned project and run the following

./build.sh

This will output the executable binary to ./gcc_output

Run

To run the program with standard user keyboard input:

./gcc_output/toy-robot.exe

To run the program's unit test suite

./gcc_output/toy-robot.exe -run-unit-tests

To run the program with external file input

./gcc_output/toy-robot.exe -file ./file_data/sample_data.txt

Message

My main aim for this challenge, was to build a testable, correct and simple (in terms of readability and algorithm complexity) implementation of the requirements of the Toy Robot Code Challenge. All recommended warnings from CPP Best Practices have been turned on for the G++ builds to demonstrate code cleanliness and portability. Unit tests along with a minimal unit test framework have been added to demonstrate correctness.

Classes and structs have been implemented where I felt they made sense, but I have not tried to shoehorn the entire design into object oriented patterns.

I have tried to demonstrate a flexible design by allowing the unit tests, file input and std::cin options within the same executable via optional command line flags. Arguably the tests should be in their own project which could allow easy switching via setting the startup project, but I wanted to keep this as self contained as possible for easy portability between compilers. I would generally seperate tests into their own binary in a larger application.

Feedback

Please get in touch with me at hulbert dot adam at gmail dot com for feedback on this submission

rad-corps / toy-robot