Latest Plane Crash Coding Challenge

This is the code written by Mateus Batista Santos for the Full Stack Software Engineer technical test.

The Tech Stack chosen was: Laravel 5.6, Nginx and PHP-FPM and PostgreSQL + PostGIS. The reason to use it is because of my know-how and I didn't have to install anything new on my workstation so I could start to work as soon as possible.

For development was used laradock on a Linux environment with Debian 8.6 as Operation System.

The Coding Challenge Specifications

You are building an API and web frontend for a mini-Wikipedia with only a single long article called 'Latest_plane_crash'. Shortly after a plane crash happened, there is a surge of API requests for this article from app and desktop users (greater than 20K requests per second). As an approximation for some data massaging, each request for the article in your server needs to recursively calculate fibonacci(34).

At the same time, a lot of editors following the news are scrambling to update the page with an interactive map as details emerge (up to 10 uploads per second). Updates to the page happen with a simple editor interface. Your interface also has an affordance to Add a Map, which allows for adding a map and one or more points of interest in the map to a page. Subsequent loads of the page should show an interactive map in the correct place. Your server code will run on a single 12-core server.

Install and Run (For Development)

Install NPM

NPM was not used within a Docker container due the slow performance. So, to run the project properly install npm. You can install npm the way you think is better and it will run normally with recent versions. On this project I used the 3.10.10 version.

sudo apt-get install npm

Install Docker and Docker Compose

If you are using Debian follow the official install guide to install docker https://docs.docker.com/install/linux/docker-ce/debian/

Docker Compose can be installed using a single tutorial for any linux distro https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/

Get the docker0 bridge IP to use on future steps of installation and settings

sudo ifconfig docker0

In my case the IP is 172.17.0.1

Install PostgreSQL

sudo apt-get install -y postgresql-9.5 postgresql-contrib-9.5;

Configure PostgreSQL to accept docker requests

sudo sed -i 's/\(all *\)\(md5\|peer\)/\1trust/' /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/pg_hba.conf;
sudo sed -i "/^#listen_addresses/i listen_addresses='*'" /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/postgresql.conf;

echo 'host    all             all             172.17.0.1/16           md5' | sudo tee -a /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/pg_hba.conf > /dev/null 2>&1;

Create Database and pgadmin user

sudo -u postgres psql --command="CREATE USER pgadmin WITH PASSWORD 'secret';"  > /dev/null 2>&1;
sudo -u postgres psql --command="CREATE DATABASE dbname OWNER pgadmin;"  > /dev/null 2>&1;

Install and configure PostGIS

  sudo apt-get install -y build-essential \
    postgresql-server-dev-9.5 \
    libxml2-dev \
    libproj-dev \
    libjson0-dev \
    libgeos-dev \
    xsltproc \
    docbook-xsl \
    docbook-mathml \
    libgdal-dev

  cd ~/
  wget http://download.osgeo.org/postgis/source/postgis-2.2.2.tar.gz > /dev/null 2>&1;
  tar -zxvf postgis-2.2.2.tar.gz  > /dev/null 2>&1;
  rm -rf postgis-2.2.2.tar.gz
  cd postgis-2.2.2
  ./configure > /dev/null 2>&1;
  make  > /dev/null 2>&1;
  sudo make install  > /dev/null 2>&1;
  sudo ldconfig
  sudo make comments-install  > /dev/null 2>&1;
  sudo ln -sf /usr/share/postgresql-common/pg_wrapper /usr/local/bin/shp2pgsql
  sudo ln -sf /usr/share/postgresql-common/pg_wrapper /usr/local/bin/pgsql2shp
  sudo ln -sf /usr/share/postgresql-common/pg_wrapper /usr/local/bin/raster2pgsql
  rm -rf postgis-2.2.2/

Run needed Docker containers

Inside the project folder execute the following commands to get the stack up and running:

cd laradock
docker-compose up -d workspace nginx php-fpm

Build and Configure project

Copy the .env-example file into .env and change the needed parameters chosen for the database settings.

cd laradock
docker-compose exec workspace composer install
cd ../ # go back to the project root directory
npm install

Run migrations

Inside the root of the project execute the following commands:

cd laradock
docker-compose exec workspace php artisan migrate

Build CSS and JS with webpack

Inside the root of the project execute the following commands:

npm run dev

Or, if you wish to run browser-sync

npm run watch

Now the project should be accessible at localhost

If npm fails to compile it might be some wrong dependencies installation. Try:

npm install ol

Future Improvements

Due the time to code some improvements needs to be done:

Use JMeter to stress the server and verify performance
Better UX with the map on mobile devices
Improve responsiviness of the map
Configure Nginx to use effectively the 12 core for concurrent requests
Improve feedback messages
Establish a stream between the client and the server to notify when new information is added
Improve documentation
Implement some diff checker to make possible multiple concurrent edits
User a web editor to edit the article

Feedbacks?

Thank you for reviewing this code. I am open to any kind feedback that can help me improve my skills for the future. If you have some please email me

thesocialdev / planecrash_challenge