rhysgoehring / aetna_assessment_movie_web_code

Rhys Goehring's Movie Web Code Test

Thank you very much for the opportunity to complete this assessment and hopefully move forward to the next steps of joining the Aetna team! I enjoyed this assessment and hope you like what I've done with the project.

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How I Approached the Problem

The origial project was structured and layed out well which made getting an understanding of what was happening in the app very straightforward before I started working on it.

I wanted my code to be just as easy to follow. I considered avoiding class components and only utilizing the hooks API, but I wanted to display a good understanding of React concepts both old and new.

I decided to use class components on container components such as views and App.js that connected to the redux store and/or needed lifecycle methods that were easier to understand than using useEffect.

The rest of my components are functional and only track state locally if necessary.

Following the principle of simplicity, I also decided to manage all styles in app.scss rather than using a more modular structure as there aren't an overwhelming amount of classes being used in the app.

I also setup a Trello board with checklists for the requirements in each story so I could be sure I didn't leave anything out.

Difficulties

• I ran into a little bit of trouble using the spread operator and arrow functions within my class components and traced it to being a webpack / babel issue. After adding a couple plugins everything worked as expected.

• I had some issues in the title search part of the assessment specifically in dealing with changing the URL. I found using history directly solved my problems. There is still one issue I wasn't able to resolve:

  • If the user navigates to the Home page from the MovieDetail page and then presses the forward button in their browser to move back to MovieDetail, no movie data loads.

Thoughts on the Project/Assessment

I thought this assessment was an excellent way of testing React/Redux knowledge. I have completed assessments for other roles that are either a little too simplified and didn't give an opportunity to show what I know as well as assessments that come with a very large codebase that is difficult to get familiarized with in a day. This project was not too large but had the complexity needed to show off the right skills.