Pinpoint.Links

This is a small project that we ask applicants to complete as part of the application process.

It's designed to be a simple application following some of the standards and practices that we use in our production applications.

Please e-mail me at [email protected] if you run into problems. I will expect that you can explain to me what you've tried and what steps you've taken on your own to troubleshoot the issue.

This project is just as much (if not more so) to see how well you communicate about issues as it is about your abilities as a PHP developer.

Installation

You'll need to have a PHP development environment to work on this project. At the very least you should have PHP 7.0 and MySQL 5.7.

A fairly simple way to get a compatible development environment setup is to use Laravel Homestead which uses Vagrant and VirtualBox.

1. Clone this git repo to your machine
2. Point your web server at the public folder
3. Create a new database (ideally MySQL, but SQLite should also work)
4. Copy config/phinx.dist.php to config/phinx.php and configure the database credentials
5. Make sure you have composer installed
6. Run composer install
7. Run vendor/bin/phinx migrate
8. Run vendor/bin/phinx seed:run

You should now have a running version of the application.

The Project

This application is a very simple link sharing site.

Assuming the phinx scripts ran you should have a few links already listed. You should be able to log in with the email [email protected] and password p4ssw0rd!.

Once you login, you should now be able to click on "Submit" in the nav bar and submit new links.

New Feature

What I'd like you to do, is add the ability to submit text instead of a URL (like on Hacker News). Then when the title shows on the homepage, clicking it would take you to a page that shows the text. There doesn't need to be any support for Markdown or anything, plain text is fine.

This should be done in a fork of this repo (see Forking Projects).

When you're done, submit a pull request.

Architecture

Our application is built in a way you may not be familiar with. We use a few patterns that I'll try to explain.

Clean Architecture

I'm a big fan of Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and his Clean Architecture pattern.

This means that I try to isolate my domain logic from hard dependencies and prefer to depend on interfaces that I create. I can then implement those interfaces using existing libraries without worrying that if I have to change things, that I'll have to rewrite all of my code.

CQRS

First read the very good explanation by Martin Fowler on CQRS.

What that means for us is that the main application either reads data from the database or submits a command to a command bus to do work. We can then write listeners that read commands from the command bus and actually write to the database.

We're using AtlasORM to read and write to the database and Tactician as our command bus.

Action-Domain-Responder (ADR)

ADR is a pattern described by Paul M. Jones in Action-Domain-Responder. The gist is that instead of having monolithic controllers that do everything from handling the request, querying the database, and populating the templates, that we break them up into smaller pieces.

We're using Paul's ADR framework Radar which itself is built using other projects that Paul built like Aura.

Andrew Shell explains ADR and how Radar implements it in his blog post Radar Under the Hood. His blog FutureProof PHP can also be considered further documentation of how we think about software development and in particular the libraries we use in this application.

Other Significant Information

We use Phinx for database migrations. It is available via vendor/bin/phinx once you've done a composer install. Any database changes you make need to be committed to your repo as phinx migrations.

Bonus points for unit tests, but at this stage of the game it's not a requirement especially for code that interacts with the database.