Submission Feedback

[davidhorak]

Hi Stefan! Thank you for your submission, below are some notes.

Good

• Using an existing framework (bootstrap) provides us here with some basic styling and responsive behaviour.
• Input validation:
  • Email and phone number has input validation, preventing to enter invalid data.
• UX:
  • Navbar is great addition to help with the overall system navigation.
  • Search is great addition for finding the right users.
  • Adding the cancel button on the create, edit page helps to eliminate dead-ends, not forcing users to use the native navigation back button.
  • Good to capture that significant non-reversible actions should be confirmed by users before executing. E.g. delete a user.
• UI
  • The phone and email icons help to quickly differentiate the data on the listing page.
• System integrity:
  • Account uniqueness based on the email prevents me to create duplicate users.

Areas of improvements

These are notes upon which you can optionally update the submission. Also, this is not a comprehensive list, rather some high level notes, if you would feel that you can improve the solution by other changes, making the implementation more suitable to expose to real users, please do so.

• Accessibility: Could we apply some beset practices for accessibility, e.g. title for actionable elements.
• UX:
  • The listing page does not differentiate between empty list and empty search results, could we communicate this better to users?
  • The search is performed on multiple fields, how could we communicate this to the users?
  • How we would handle a long list of users on the listing page?
  • Having a lot of search results, how we could communicate the search hits to users on the individual cards?
• System integrity:
  • I was able to delete all users. Let's assume that only admins would be able to add users, how we could setup the app to prevent a dead-end situation?
• Navigation: not mapped urls give me an a hard 404 server error
• Tests: it would great to validate some of the functionality via tests

Kind regards, David (Instawork)

[treestompz]

Hi @davidhorak

Thank you so much for your feedback! I have made some recent commits thanks to your comments.

New env vars and migration

First, please note there are new environment variables and a new migration to run.

• Notes on new environment variables now added to README: https://github.com/treestompz/member_manager/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#environment-variables-env-file
• Notes on migrations in README: https://github.com/treestompz/member_manager/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#database-setup

Addressing your comments

I will address each of your comments below in order.

Accessibility: Could we apply some beset practices for accessibility, e.g. title for actionable elements.

I have added basic accessibility features in this commit, although there is room to continue work on this: https://github.com/treestompz/member_manager/commit/a63b2178fd0fd95738c754350d91c254a4ec0ec2

The listing page does not differentiate between empty list and empty search results, could we communicate this better to users?

Now showing different text between empty list and empty search results: https://github.com/treestompz/member_manager/commit/a63b2178fd0fd95738c754350d91c254a4ec0ec2#diff-3b64d8f2c478822af1eed609fba19ec12dac7b704cb0212e8e433fd2e8765248R68

The search is performed on multiple fields, how could we communicate this to the users?

Now using new placeholder text: https://github.com/treestompz/member_manager/commit/a63b2178fd0fd95738c754350d91c254a4ec0ec2#diff-3b64d8f2c478822af1eed609fba19ec12dac7b704cb0212e8e433fd2e8765248R23

How we would handle a long list of users on the listing page?

I have added a complete pagination system that works in the default view or search view. Note that team members are also now order by last name, first name: https://github.com/treestompz/member_manager/commit/3a6cacb51719662989d96497aaf95a2084201f1a

• Note: Set to 5 Team Members per page for easier testing. In the future we also might make this an environment variable.
• Note: A future addition would be to add a way to bootstrap some dummy data so that we start with 50 Team Members in the database. This is just a better developer experience.

Having a lot of search results, how we could communicate the search hits to users on the individual cards?

• Assuming you are asking how we would show why each result was shown on the card themselves, we could highlight the text that matched the search query in a distinct color such as blue.
• (Example: If we have a user “John Smith, johnsmith@ example.com” If the search query is “john,” the “john” in the name and email would be highlighted in blue.)
• However, I don’t think this is a request I’ll be implementing. Since I have another interview with Instawork in a couple days and want to prepare, it can serve to act as a real life scenario where tradeoffs need to be made to meet a deadline. Although this feature would be easy to implement using a new template_tag like so: member.first_name|highlight:request.GET.search, we have to be extra careful to avoid XSS attacks. Given that the value of the feature is low (the user is only searching by 3 fields - it should be fairly obvious why a result was returned already) but the risk of disaster is high (XSS attacks,) I’ll choose to backlog this feature for now. In a real scenario, this is something we would want to take our time with and also get properly peer-reviewed.
  • Alternatively, we could avoid using template tags altogether and build this as a more robust structured feature. The tradeoff is it would require a lot more refactoring, but may be safer from a XSS-risk perspective.

I was able to delete all users. Let's assume that only admins would be able to add users, how we could setup the app to prevent a dead-end situation?

• I’m not entirely sure I understand what you mean here. Can you please clarify?
• Are you talking about a scenario where there must be at least 1 admin user in the app? If so, we can add that logic to the code where appropriate, and might want to also consider bootstrapping a default user if no admins users exist.

Navigation: not mapped urls give me an a hard 404 server error

I have added custom templates that match our app's style for 400, 403, 404, and 500 errors: https://github.com/treestompz/member_manager/commit/a63b2178fd0fd95738c754350d91c254a4ec0ec2#diff-3ce6e17f19c5df753b29263cd246d6dff65d6ab8eec278f97931f35d06e51ec3

Tests: it would great to validate some of the functionality via tests

Agreed 100%. Tests are something I would definitely add for a real production application, but given I have upcoming Instawork interviews I want to prepare for, I will not be adding them here.

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Thank you!

Thanks again for your feedback and great suggestions. I understand this is an interview exercise so please don't feel any pressure to continue - I'm sure you're quite busy. However, if you want to, I more than welcome it!

Take care, Stefan

[davidhorak]

@treestompz Thank you spending an extra time to address the feedback. No need to spent any extra time, I believe that we have now a good baseline here! Great job! 👏🏻

[treestompz]

@davidhorak Thanks David - much appreciated! 😄