Coding Exercise Project

This repository contains small skeleton projects in a number of programming languages.

It is designed to aid in the coding exercise stage of the Guardian's recruitment process for Software Engineers.

To learn more, please see the repository of exercises.

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Setting up your environment

For the coding exercise you will need to be able to do two things:

• Write code in the language of your choice, sharing your screen to pair with the remote interviewer
• Run that code
• Optionally: write tests for the code you have written

These skeleton projects can be used to set up such an environment quickly should you wish but are not required. You can set up your own environment but please do so before you join the Hangout and check that you can run and test your code.

If you have any issues with your environment please let your interviewer know as soon as you join the Hangout so that they can adjust the exercise accordingly.

Prerequisites

Every skeleton declares the toolchain it needs in a .tool-versions file. For example, the Scala project asks for:

java corretto-21
sbt 1

You are free to install those tools however you like — a system package manager, a language-specific version manager, or an existing installation. All that matters is that they end up on your PATH. If they are not, ./script/setup will fail with a "command not found" error.

Recommended: mise

The quickest way to get the right versions is mise, which reads .tool-versions and installs all listed tools.

Follow mise's getting started guide to install it and activate it in your shell. Then, from inside the language directory of your choice:

mise install

How to use

This repository has a directory per language. Each skeleton follows the same structure with a README and a passing test.

To get started:

💻 Clone the repo git clone git@github.com:guardian/coding-exercise-project.git

🗂 Switch directories to the language of your choosing

🔧 Install the toolchain listed in .tool-versions, e.g. with mise install

🔌 Install dependencies and perform other setup tasks ./script/setup

🧪 Run the tests and watch them pass ./script/test

💻 Now it is up to you! Using your editor of choice, start writing code!

Missing language?

Please raise a PR to add it with:

• A README
• A .tool-versions declaring the language toolchain, pinned to its major version
• A passing example test
• A ./script/setup script to install dependencies and do any other initial setup
• A ./script/test script to run the tests

Adding a .tool-versions file enrols a project in CI, so ./script/setup and ./script/test must exist and be executable — the Check project structure job enforces this.

If the toolchain is built from source and needs system libraries that may not be present, add an executable ./script/system-packages that installs them. CI runs it before installing the toolchain, and anyone building that toolchain locally can run it themselves. This script is run separately to ./script/setup, because setup runs after the toolchain is already on your PATH. Only php needs this today.

The requirement for the ./script commands is to keep consistency across languages and make it easy to switch between them. Read more here.

Note for Guardian interviewers

Do not push solutions to the coding exercise as it is a public repository.