markkop / cs-balancer

An algorithm to match Customers and Customer Success made in Node and Ruby

✨ Customer Success Balancing

This project is part of a challenge which I had to make a Ruby implementation that assigns and gets the ID of the Customer Success person with the highest number of customers.

Requisites

The requisites are available in Portuguese at the other README file in this project.

Progress History

When I first started this challenge, I had no idea on how to code in Ruby. I've participated in a few Ruby community meetups in the past, but all I knew was that it's not a super popular language and most of what's done in Ruby is using Rails.

So I wanted to approach this problem within my JavaScript domain. I've created the node folder, replicated the tests from the Ruby file using Jest and in a few pomodoros I had the code implemented with the tests passing.

Then I translated the JS code to Ruby by googling a lot. Its syntax reminds me Python, but it seems to have a lot of cool Sugar Syntax like JavaScript such as select, reject, reduce, map and so on. I really like these.

Eventually I managed to make all Ruby tests pass, except one: the performance test. My algorithm had a complexity of O(nxm) which I didn't bother until the test fails, and I even had it fixed by considering the minimum values for one of the parameters informed in the challenge proposal.

Specifically, it'll work if you make one of the loops skip if a Customer Success has a score value of 0, since they can only have scores bigger than 0 and lower than 10.000. However, that's not actually solving the performance problem which was clearly the goal of that test.

By thinking and searching for a while, I've tried another approach in which we order both CS and Customer list by score and match them with only* one iteration.
*not really one since we have a while in there to consider some edge cases - which made me to create an extra test case.

So, after implementing it and applying a bit of refactor, I've replicated the same strategy to the Node version.

Finally, since I had tests for both languages, it looked cool to have a little green checkmark by the side of my commits indicating that all tests were passing, so I've added some GitHub Actions to the project.

Learnings

This challenge was pretty mind-blowing not only because I had a first real contact with Ruby, but also because I've managed to optimize a code using an approach I've never used before.