The point of the take home task is to give you the opportunity to demonstrate your strengths in the most open and creative way possible.
The task itself is entirely up to you to choose, but ideally you should choose something that focuses on automation to makes life easier or better in some way. You can use whatever tools you want. You may spend as little or as much time on the submission as you desire. If you already have something that meets the criteria below, you may submit that directly without any additional work.
If we like your submission, you’ll be called back for a technical interview with some of our senior developers. During that interview, you should be prepared to present a demonstration of your submission so that our developers can discuss the details with you. So keep it in mind that anything that starts a good converstion or has a story behind it will probably be treated favourably.
Here are the requirements of the take-home test:
- The code you write needs to be pushed to a public git repository of your choosing (e.g. GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc)
- You do not have to start a new project from scratch. It’s perfectly fine to submit something you have previously created yourself. Maybe it’s something you work on in your spare time, just for yourself!
- It’s totally ok to take an existing open source project and expand upon it in some way. If you do so, please ensure proper attribution to the original authors and respect the license.
- Your submission must contain more than a git single commit. We require seeing your implementation history with multiple commits as that is critical to our evaluation.
- Some explanation about what the project is for, how it works, what we should look at, how we should run it, etc, should be included in the submission, preferably as a readme file in the repository.
How you will be evaluated:
- Our focus will be on your contributions to the code base, not others.
- The quality of your code (such as use of coding standards, style checks, automated tests, clarity of documentation, and commit history)
- The novelty and creativity of your submission
Here are a few additional tips about the kind of tools we’d be interested to see you use in your submission. (But please don’t feel limited to this list)
- Choose any programming language that you wish
- Tools to aid local development such as Vagrant/virtualbox or any of the Hashicorp tools
- Configuration management tools such as Ansible/Saltstack/Puppet/Chef
- CICD tools such as Jenkins/TravisCI/Spinnaker/GoCD
- Public Cloud services such as AWS/Azure/GCE