About Software Development @ Cyberhawk

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The task

We've designed this task to try and give you the ability to show us what you can do and hopefully flex your technical and creative muscles. You can't show off too much here, show us you at your best and wow us!

To make things as simple as we could, we've opted to use Laravel Sail to provide a quick and convenient development environment, this will require you to install Docker Desktop before you can start the test. We've provided some more detailed instructions below in case this is your first time using Docker or Sail.

We'd like you to build an application that will display an example wind farm, its turbines and their components. We'd like to be able to see components and their grades (measurement of damage/wear) ranging between 1 - 5.

For example, a turbine could contain the following components:

• Blade
• Rotor
• Hub
• Generator

Don't worry about using real names for components or accurate looking data, we're more interested in how you structure the application and how you present the data.

Don't be afraid of submitting incomplete code or code that isn't quite doing what you would like, just like your maths teacher, we like to see your working. Just Document what you had hoped to achieve and your thoughts behind any unfinished code, so that we know what your plan was.

Requirements

• Display a list of turbine inspections
• Each Turbine should have a number of components
• A component can be given a grade from 1 to 5 (1 being perfect and 5 being completely broken/missing)
• Use Laravel Models to represent the Entities in the task.

Bonus Points

• Great UX/UI
• Use of React JS
• Use of Tailwind CSS
• Use of 3D
• Use of a web map technology in the display of the data
• Automated tests
• API Authentication
• Use of coding style guidelines (we use PSR-12 and AirBnb)
• Use of git with clear logical commits
• Specs/Plans/Designs

Submitting The Task

We're not too fussy about how you submit the task, providing it gets to us and we're able to run it we'll be happy however here are some of the ways we commonly see:

• Fork this repo, work and add us as a collaborator on your GitHub repo and send us a link
• ZIP the project and email it to us at [email protected]

Setting Everything Up

As mentioned above we have chosen to make use of Laravel Sail as the foundation of this technical test.

• If you haven't already, you will need to install Docker Desktop.
• One that is installed your next step is to install this projects composer dependencies (including Sail).
  • This will require either PHP 8 installed on your local machine or the use of a small docker container that runs PHP 8 that can install the dependencies for us.
• If you haven't done so already copy the .env.example file to .env
  • If you are running a local development environment you may need to change some default ports in the .env file
    • We've already changed mysql to 33060 and NGINX to 81 for you
• It should now be time to start Sail and the task

Installing Composer Dependencies

https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/sail#installing-composer-dependencies-for-existing-projects

docker run --rm \
-u "$(id -u):$(id -g)" \
-v $(pwd):/var/www/html \
-w /var/www/html \
laravelsail/php81-composer:latest \
composer install --ignore-platform-reqs

Your Notes

I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this technical test as it as allowed me to put my theoretical ideas to practice and I'm quite happy with what I have managed to produce. I tried to cover as many aspects of the requirements as possible.

My Approach

I started by breaking the project down into backend and front-end. Then proceeded to further break diffrent components of the back-end down into the individual tasks, you would see this in my git branching strategy, as I branched of my development branch for every task. That's until I decided to have a single front-end branch, as I have been very mindful of time and how long I have been working on it for, so I made a decision to get everything else done as best as I can and get it to you guys.

I approached the task as diligently and thoroughly as I could, by starting of with a TDD approach to the back-end requirements and modeled my objects in accordance to Laravel's object model. I stopped writing tests as a result of time, I would have like to write tests for every single scenario possible, but again the time thing got me worried, so I decided to press on with getting as much as I could done. I might go back over the weekend to tidy up some of the tests, as you would find that my approach to testing changed whilst I was working on the turbine feature.

I also changed my whole development approach at the same time. When work began, I treated the task as just a test and not a product, this was put right when I made the change to my testing, as I opted to go down the service repository pattern, as this allowed me to build a system that is easily extensible, maintainable and re-usable.

Directions with which the project took changed, as I got further into development, as I was trying to minimise technical debt and repetition. You will come across half transitioned ideas, those were intentionally left as is. I guess we can say that's my attempt to show my workings as you would in mathematics.

My Thought Process

I figured that since turbines can't exist without a location the best place to begin would be farms, so I designed the farm entity's model, afterwhich I moved onto the turbines which has a relationship with a farm, since a farm can house multiple turbines but a turbine can only belong to a farm at a particular point in time. Said turbine can be dismantled and moved onto another farm if required, but it can't exist on two farms simultaneously. See diagram below.

The component entity is home to all the different types of components that a turbine might require. A turbine components entity has relationships with both the component entity and the turbines entity. This is where a relationship is formed between a turbine and all it's diffrent component parts. Based on these relationships, I decided to display the list of inspections associated with a turbine, when we view an individual turbine, as it makes logical sense to be able to see all of a turbine's inspections and then interact with them individually.

UML diagram

Things That I did

• Use of coding style guidelines (we use PSR-12 and AirBnb)
• Use of git with clear logical commits
• Specs/Plans/Designs
• Made use of custom error handling, and exceptions
• Used custom request to process all store, update and edit functionalities on the Api endpoints
• Made use of services
• Request Validation
• Tried to separate concerns of the project as best as I could
• Use trait where applicable, I'm sure that I can find more places to use traits, if I were to go over another round of refactoring
• I gave it my best shot!

Things I Wanted To DO

I was hoping to be able to try my hand out on the following bonus tasks, but I wasn't able to get to them. But I might in the future, as I would always go back to this project to tweak it and implement some of the tasks below.

• Use of React JS
• Use of Tailwind CSS
• Use of 3D
• Use of a web map technology in the display of the data
• API Authentication

Running The Project

You should be able to run the project by following the initial instructions supplied with the test, that relates to getting things up and running.

Things to watchout for

• I used a .env.testing file, just in case you try running the project and this causes a problem.
• I have DB_HOST property in the phpunit.xml file. Although this should be commented out in the main branch, but just in case I did not comment it out, please do. As this will prevent you from running "sail artisan test" command successfully.
• I have modified the seeder file, in order to help generate some demo data to run the project with.

Getting About

Front-end Urls

• / (Will redirect you to /farms) as farms is the entry point, here you will see a list of all farms available
• /farms/{farmId} (Shows a farm)
• /farms/{farmId}/turbines (Shows a farm and all it's associated turbines)
• /turbines/{turbineId} (This page shows a turbine, a list of all its inspections and its components)
• /turbines/{turbineId}/inspections/{inspectionId} (This shows a singel inspection for a turbine)

Api Endpoints

please see all available endpoints for this project in the link below:
https://gold-resonance-228549.postman.co/workspace/Cyberhawk-~f61f5d7f-946f-4f8f-b99f-188a89c159b1/collection/11629888-6261d5e0-5a01-4871-838f-6ce7299634fd?action=share&creator=11629888

I'm happy to answer any questions you have for me.