Code Review Challenge

This is a sample repo containing some code to be reviewed by candidates as part of their interview process.

Scenario

Imagine an early-career engineer on your team proposes this code as a prototype for your new art search application. It technically meets the product requirements, but the code has lots of room for improvement. You have plenty of time to rework things, so you can use this code review to asychronously guide and educate your colleague.

Do not worry about hurting anyone's feelings. This is a tough engineer that's hungry to learn and is eager for criticism.

Instructions

1. Clone this repository to your local machine.
2. Create a new private repository on GitHub so others can't copy your work.
3. Push your local clone up to your private repository while preserving history.
4. Create a pull request in your private repo to merge the feature-art-search branch into the main branch.
5. Add a review of the code, pointing out everything you see could be improved with explanations.
6. Share your private repo with the reviewer(s) requested when you were sent this challenge

Details

• This is not a typical late stage PR, but an early, naive proposal that needs fixing.
• Do not worry about being overly critical. There's a lot to criticize.
• We're measuring for now well you spot problems, explain their flaws, and what you suggest as alternatives.
• Consider cloning and running the code locally so you can see how it works and test suggested changes.
• This exercise should probably take you 30 minutes to an hour.
• Give feedback for anything dangerous and anything that could be improved.
• Feel free to make any suggestions for code reorganization or alternate approaches.

Example

The following is an example of something we'd expect to be called out. Rather than parsing query params manually with:

const queryString = someUrl.slice(someUrl('?') + 1)
const { type } = JSON.parse(
  `{"${queryString.replace(/&/g, '","').replace(/=/g, '":"')}"}`,
  (key, value) => {
    return key === '' ? value : decodeURIComponent(value)
  }
)

consider leveraging native APIs like URLSearchParams:

const type = new URLSearchParams(new URL(someUrl).search).get('type')

Manually parsing a URL for query params is a solved problem. Doing so manually creates unnecessary complexity, especially using unnecessary regular expressions, making things fragile and harder to maintain.

Development

This is a Next.js project bootstrapped with create-next-app.

To run this project locally using the development server:

npm run dev
# or
yarn dev
# or
pnpm dev
# or
bun dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

Learn More

To learn more about Next.js, take a look at the following resources:

• Next.js Documentation - learn about Next.js features and API.
• Learn Next.js - an interactive Next.js tutorial.

You can check out the Next.js GitHub repository - your feedback and contributions are welcome!