theScore "the Rush" Interview Challenge

Challenge Background

We have sets of records representing football players' rushing statistics. All records have the following attributes:

• Player (Player's name)
• Team (Player's team abbreviation)
• Pos (Player's postion)
• Att/G (Rushing Attempts Per Game Average)
• Att (Rushing Attempts)
• Yds (Total Rushing Yards)
• Avg (Rushing Average Yards Per Attempt)
• Yds/G (Rushing Yards Per Game)
• TD (Total Rushing Touchdowns)
• Lng (Longest Rush -- a T represents a touchdown occurred)
• 1st (Rushing First Downs)
• 1st% (Rushing First Down Percentage)
• 20+ (Rushing 20+ Yards Each)
• 40+ (Rushing 40+ Yards Each)
• FUM (Rushing Fumbles)

In this repo is a sample data file rushing.json.

Challenge Requirements

1. Create a web app. This must be able to do the following steps

   1. Create a webpage which displays a table with the contents of rushing.json
   2. The user should be able to sort the players by Total Rushing Yards, Longest Rush and Total Rushing Touchdowns
   3. The user should be able to filter by the player's name
   4. The user should be able to download the sorted data as a CSV, as well as a filtered subset

2. The system should be able to potentially support larger sets of data on the order of 10k records.

3. Update the section Installation and running this solution in the README file explaining how to run your code

Installation and running this solution

Requirements

• Ruby 2.7 or higher
• ruby gem puma or similar rack http server gem
• Mongodb is running, at the default port 27017

Starting the server

• clone this repo
• start Mongodb, e.g. on ubuntu/debian sudo systemctl start mongod
• import the data with bundle exec rake seed, this must be done
• start the server via puma config.ru, by default it runs on port 9292
• (during development the shotgun gem can be used also shotgun --server=puma --port=9292 config.ru)
• navigate to http://localhost:9292/v1/players in the browser
• optionally navigate to http://localhost:9292/doc for swagger docs (even though the json api is not used)

Brief notes on framework choice

Why Mongodb?

• we're optimizing for reads, there's no realtime update of player records in the requirements
• there's only one entity type in the data, we literally have documents fit for a document db
• we only need to simple filter (search) and sort, mongodb can provide simple indexing for text search
• conversely, we don't need transactionals and relational joins so we don't need a sql database for this

Why Grape instead of Rails/Sinatra?

• we only need to implement 2-3 endpoints, and initially I started off with the assumption that we only need to implement simple query responses in json
• we're using mongo so we don't need to whole ActiveRecord ORM or full blown MVC like rails (though rails has API mode)
• lightweight and sits right on top of rack
• easy to switch to rendering html when the need arose, with slim being the template library as well

Why htmx for frontend?

• a backend developer is being asked to implement a full stack solution in a few hours :)
• it is in some ways a cleaner, more declarative way of routing ajax calls to insert/replace elements in the DOM, a PJAX pattern like turbolinks or Phoenix LiveView so I have heard
• we don't have a lot of dynamic or complicated frontend calls, each command is one button press that fires a GET request to the server no json body payload
• no need to use javascript to assemble rest calls since they're so simple (by design) and the response are almost just the table of data as well

Caveats

• Will explain in interview :) but it's still pretty clunky, given more time to experiement I would still use React and picky up prettier UI framework
• As they say, if you start with Sinatra or similarly minimal frameworks for Ruby, eventually you'll end up building Rails anyway :)

Overall, for something more serious, we should probably use Rails and React, or maybe even something more that can perform better, with more security out of the box, but I intentionally picked a minimal framework for the scope of this assignment.