Customizable Shop Coding Challenge

Introduction

Dear readers my name is Jose Rodriguez and I built this shop. It is a flexible, data-driven platform for selling configurable sports products. The goal is to enable selling bicycles today; skis, surfboards, etc. tomorrow.

Trade-offs

Software Design DDD & Pragmatism

• I chose not to follow by the book DDD efforts because I think it would have been overkill here. For example, I chose to have a single /domain/ directory with the file names acting as the subdomain contexts

• [!NOTE] I think it's worthwhile to mention that when necessary I did implement some DTOs and mapper classes

  • Similarly the /db/ and /api/ folders could've been infrastructure and interfaces folders respectively to provide a layer of abstraction and interchangeable parts
  • Domain objects as well should not be exposed to the http layer but we add in the json tags and try to keep the code lightweight and non-complex
    • This also extends for writing mapper classes for talking between the infrastructure and the domain. For example, db <-> domain dedicated adapters were not created
• For some of the migrations I have written "unnecessary" at the top. These exist to simplify my life doing local development and to avoid developing an admin panel for creating a state where the app is useable

Product

• I have decided to not include a typical user creation flow this was with a couple of motivations
  • I want faster tear up and tear down for me to iterate on the challenge, which I can do by simulating a database state useful for it
  • User credentials and session/key management doesn't seem to be the focus of the challenge
• One with a keen eye can already tell that an admin panel for the business owner is missing from the shop. I decided to keep the focus on the core shopping experience: product builder, customizer, cart, and UI.
  • Topics such as authentication and authorization would creep up once we introduce user and admin logins for example.

Technology Choices

Backend

• Go + GORM + Postgres
• No OpenAPI codegen
  • I opted for handwritten handlers/models and controllers to stay in my comfort zone and reduce dependencies. In a larger team, I’d adopt an API-first approach with OpenAPI and code generation

Frontend

Note

As I mentioned in previous rounds of the interview process, I only have some small years of experience writing front-end code. Apologies if you spot any patterns that might upset you this is a whole world I am still delving into ;). If for nothing else, the front-end part of this challenge can be seen as my ability to use my knowledge + AI to make something somewhat functional.

• Vite
• React Router
• TailwindCSS (DaisyUI)

Other Things Left Out of this Challenge

To keep the scope of this challenge focused there are a couple more things left out of the challenge that would be a requirement for a production system:

• Structured Logging
• Monitoring
• Testing
• CI/CD
• Infra
• CDN for fetching page assets
  • Though a hack was implemented to fetch the assets from a predefined location on the local repository

Referencing Specific Challenge Requirements

Please find answers to the challenge specification in the ./challenge-requirements folder. The following is the location to the requirements:

Requirement	Location
Data Model chosen	data-model
Main user actions	main-user-actions
Product page	main-user-actions
Add-to-Cart action	cart
Administrative workflows	admin-workflows
New product creation	new-product-parts
Pricing rules & calculations	setting-prices

How to run locally

Docker Compose

cd ./shop-backend
docker-compose build 
docker-compose up -d

Frontend

cd ./shop-frontend
yarn install
yarn vite

About Jose

Professionally

I'm a software engineer with a strong product mindset and a preference for simple, maintainable solutions. I enjoy taking ownership of problems end-to-end while at the same time making the product and the areas I go through better. I also have a strong proven track record of creating abstractions and tools that can help more than just my immediate team.

Personally

Outside of code, I greatly enjoy a variety of physical activities like hiking and skiing. I like to game as a hobby whenever my mind craves some puzzling or number crunching activities. I also collect board games and consider myself a very social person.

Aside from that I also code during my freetime, I love developing indie games and contributing to the indie game dev community.