markdentoom / balance_bots

Balance Bots

This repo contains the solution to a coding challenge called "balance bots". The instructions for this challenge can be found in assignment.txt. It is written in Python because of the readability of the language, its built-in modules, and my familiarity with the language.

Requirements

Python version 3.9+ is required in order to run the code because of the type hinting style I used. No external modules are required.

Running the code

python src/balance_bots.py

Prints the answers to both questions in the assignment to your terminal. This should print 73 and 3965.

Running tests

python -m unittest

Runs all tests.

Notes

There are a few oddities in the code that you would likely not see in production code due to the nature of the assignment:

• I added type hinting only where I felt like it improved readability and clarity rather than strictly adding it everywhere (or nowhere at all).
• I went for a pragmatic approach when it comes to testing. I made isolated unit tests where feasible, but for some class methods (e.g. Fixture.run()) it was more convenient to just pass an entire fixture and verify the results.
• I think the Factory init method looks messy, but I am currently drawing a blank on how to make it better. I would ask code reviewers for suggestions here.
• In balance_bots.py I added if __name__ == "__main__": code so you can run the file to easily print the answers to your terminal.
• I made test_assignment.py solely to verify the answers to the questions in the assignment. It does not test any code that is not already covered by other tests.