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Urban Dynamics, Coding Exercises

Small coding / engineering / operations exercises.

PS - We're always looking to connect with talented people who love doing great work and solving interesting problems. Feel free to check out Urban Dynamics' Career page and send us an email (contact@urbdyn.com) if you're interesting learning more about being part of our team!

Hello 👋 this repo is made by Urban Dynamics to hold coding exercises. We don't think that trivia style interviews, where you're asked to regurgitate random information or do increasingly hard versions of FizzBuzz, is a real indicator of how well you do actual work. No one builds real software via esoteric mini-quizzes done with nothing but a whiteboard marker and a 10 minute time limit. So we've made this repo to hold some common coding exercises we give to people in a "take home" format. This idea is simple, build something the same way you'd do real work.

So, if you've been given an exercise to do, get comfortable in front of your computer and build something over a few hours in the same way you would when normally working, with all your standard tools and references (yes, including Google).

If you're a business, feel free to use these coding exercises yourself and contribute back. We do hope we can help have a better interview experience for our industry.

How To Approach These Problems

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you do any of these exercises:

  1. Open Ended Exercises: These exercises are intentionally open ended. Most of them will state a high level technical goal or business goal. Part of our jobs is making decisions every day and thus part of these exercises is translating them into technical results which requires you making decisions. There is no single correct or perfect answer for any of these exercises.
  2. Your Professional Standard: Do this like you'd do any other work, to your own professional standard. When building software, we always have to balance the two extremes of a minimum viable product and the most perfectly-over-engineered thing we could imagine. Somewhere in the middle is a good balance of our time to its result. So, if you have a question like "Should my work have X?", where X may be diagrams or unit tests or anything else, our answer is "What do you think? If you'd normally do X for this kind of work, then yes do it. If not, then no don't."
  3. Time: These exercises are designed to be done in approximately 2 to 8 hours, depending on the exercise and how quickly you work. There's no penalty for how long it takes you and no reward for how quickly you do it. However, if you find yourself 6 to 8 hours into working on an exercise and not close to finishing it then notify us and we'll take a look at what you've done so far and discuss what to do. Most likely, it's a case of you lacking familiarity or experience with the problem space and we'll re-evaluate what sort of role may best suite you.

Exercises

Devops

Software

SRE