talhaali00 / codingchallenge

Android Take Home Test

The purpose of this test is to evaluate your technical skills, communication and mindset.

You should exemplify the 💪 best work you can do with the provided example and perhaps 💥 surprise us with your solution. You have one week time to work on the test, but our expectations are that a fraction of the time is needed for the test.

You are expected to refactor and improve the project to avoid the mistakes it has.

Procedure

1. After completing the challenge, clean the project (builds, .gradle, etc). But remember: The project should still be runnable.
2. Compress project file as a ".zip" file.
3. Send the zip file back to the person you have been in contact with (from the recruiting team).
4. You will receive feedback for this project file which you sent us during the live interview.

Notes :

• Meaningful commit history (git) will be a plus.
• Feel free to add some comments or provide information in README.md file about things you would like to improve but didn't have time for this.
• The project zip file size should't be more 15 MB.

Project

In this project, you will have a news feed activity. It retrieves the data from the local JSON file. JSON is parsed manually and elements has been created from the parsed data.

All the logical operations are happening in MyNewsActivity.kt and the layout for the list items is stored in news_item.xml file. There is only one data class for News element and it's in model folder.

The Application is written in Kotlin.

You are free to suggest and implement any library or code snippet that you think that is going to be useful for the codebase. But please be sure to add detailed information about your suggestions and why they would be useful.

Questions

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any issues or questions. You may contact the person that sent the code challenge to you.

🚀 Have fun!

Refactor process

This project had multiple issues so I followed the following steps to make it better:

1. Move the logic for parsing the JSON to the repository. The actual parsing happens in a background thread using coroutines
2. Introduce ViewModel and LiveData to make sure data survives configuration changes while the latter presents us reactive programming for easily updating the UI using the Observer pattern
3. Use Dagger to inject dependencies easily. The news Hilt library is promising but I am yet to explore that
4. Add tests to the app
5. Fix the failing CI checks by adding an extra step. These GitHub Actions are just awesome.
6. Improve the aesthetics with stuff like loading spinners, rounded cards, and dark mode.
7. Use DataBinding and ViewBinding to keep .kts clear
8. Organize the build.gradle file. Also added signing configs
9. Improve code documentation in general

Note

//If you are on Android Gradle Plugin lower than 4.0.0, uncomment the viewBinding and dataBinding
// blocks and comment out the
// buildFeatures block for viewBinding and dataBinding to work in the build.gradle file (project level)
//    viewBinding {
//        enabled = true
//    }
//    dataBinding {
//         enabled = true
//    }