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Esper Front End Developer Challenge

Mr. Boggins, a resident of a little town in the vicinity of Auckland, New Zealand has a spare room he wants to rent out from time to time. Due to an aversion to AirBnB's logo, he insists on developing his own system for managing the availability of this room. Specifically, he wants the following things:

  • He should be able to check a calendar for which nights are booked or available for any given month. Each calendar day should refer to the night following that day -- i.e. if the night of April 4-5 is booked, this should show up on the calendar as April 4.
  • He should be able to toggle the availability of that night by clicking on that calendar day.
  • The app should save changes to a server and fetch data from the server on load.
  • The app does not need to record any other information besides which nights are free or available. Mr. Boggins considers details such as guest name or how that guest will pay to be irrelevant.

Using this repository as base, please help Mr. Boggins develop the front-end for his app. We estimate that this would take someone familiar with Typescript and React no more than 6 hours to complete, but don't worry if it takes you longer than that.

Rules

  • You can discuss this exercise with anyone you want, but please do not ask anyone to write or review your actual code.

  • You can contact us at any time for any reason.

  • You can Google anything you need to.

  • If you stumble upon someone else's solution to this exercise, please don't look at it or copy it.

  • You can use any libraries or tools that you want. We've provided an existing code-base written with the tools that we use at Esper, and we encourage you to build off of it. However, you are welcome to rewrite or modify whatever you need to complete this challenge in a reasonable amount of time. Just make sure you use the API server we've provided and that we can build and serve your code with a minimal number of terminal commands.

  • Because we may re-use this challenge with other engineering candidates, please don't fork this repo off Github or otherwise make your solution easily discoverable. You may submit your solution via zip file, patch, link to a private repo, or whatever else makes sense to you.

Getting Started

You'll need to install NodeJS. Once you have NodeJS, clone this repo and run npm run install.

Once everything is installed, run npm run watch. This will start both the API server (running on localhost:3000) and a development server with the front-end code (running on localhost:5000). Modifying the files in the ts, less, or assets directory should trigger a rebuild.

This app is written using Typescript, React, LESS, Bootstrap, moment.js, jQuery, and Lodash. The existing code will make more sense if you're familiar with those languages, libraries, or frameworks.

Version Support

We've tested this repo using Node v4.4.0 LTS, but other versions should work fine. We're also developing on Ubuntu 14.04, but any OS that supports NodeJS should work too. If you have trouble getting things working on your setup, please feel free to contact us.

API

The development server retains an ephemeral, in-memory store which nights have been booked. It has two endpoints you should be aware of:

  • GET /reserved/:start/:end - This returns a list of nights that have been reserved between :start and :end, inclusive. :start and :end are Unix timestamps (seconds since Jan 1, 1970). The result will be JSON data in this form: {"reserved": [1451559600, 1452164400, ...]}, where each number is also a Unix timestamp.

    Because Mr. Boggins lives in New Zealand, each timestamp refers to the start of a day in New Zealand (specifically, the "Pacific/Auckland" locale). Thus, the timestamp corresponding to Feb 4, 2016 00:00:00 in Auckland, New Zealand means the night of Feb 4 - Feb 5.

  • PUT /reserved/:date - This takes a JSON-encoded object of the form {"reserved": boolean} where reserved indicates whether this date should be booked (true) or available (false). :date should be a Unix timestamp adhering to the same rules as above.

Note that the API server is not the most reliable thing in the world. There is a 10% chance you will get a 500 Internal Server error. The front-end code should handle this scenario gracefully.

Some Batteries Included

We've written some basic bits for you already:

  • You can bring in new dependencies from NPM by first installing them with npm install ... and then require-ing them in vendor.js. Although we use Browserify to process vendor.js, note that this app currently just sticks all of the dependencies on the global window object.

  • There's a Calendar.Month component that you can use a basis for your app.

  • We've set up a simple Jasmine test runner at localhost:5000/test.html (see ts/Test.tsx for examples).

Evaluation Criteria

  • We don't expect you to be super familiar with Typescript, React, LESS, or anything else we're using here. We consider it a plus if you can complete this exercise using what's already here, but if you think you can do a better job using other tools (Redux, Flux, Ember, etc.), that's fine. Feel free to ask us if you have questions about how anything works.

  • Asking questions is good. We will not penalize you for asking questions. In an actual work environment, we prefer that engineers spend 30 minutes talking a problem over with someone than spend an entire day building the wrong thing.

  • We're looking for signs you understand concepts such as events, promises, and reactivity, and how those concepts are implemented in Javascript.

  • The API server is sometimes slow and sometimes buggy. Your front-end code should handle this gracefully. It should also handle a complete loss of connectivity gracefully.

  • Remember that the API server is giving your timestamps based on times in Auckland, New Zealand. The existing front-end code here is not timezone- aware, so you may have to modify it accordingly. We recommend looking at Moment Timezone.

  • We like code that is clean and easily testable. We honestly don't always do a great job of this ourselves, so your ability to demonstrate this is a big plus.

  • Please comment your code.

  • If you find this exercise too difficult or if you get stuck somewhere, feel free to talk to us. While we obviously prefer candidates who can hit the ground running, we're also willing to consider candidates who can, with some help, learn on the job.

Contact

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.