Sourcery Backend Coding Challenge

(inspired by https://github.com/busbud/coding-challenge-backend-c)

Requirements

Design a REST API endpoint that provides auto-complete suggestions for large cities.

• The endpoint is exposed at /suggestions
• The partial (or complete) search term is passed as a querystring parameter q
• The caller's location can optionally be supplied via querystring parameters latitude and longitude to help improve relative scores
• The endpoint returns a JSON response with an array of scored suggested matches
  • The suggestions are sorted by descending score
  • Each suggestion has a score between 0 and 1 (inclusive) indicating confidence in the suggestion (1 is most confident)
  • Each suggestion has a name which can be used to disambiguate between similarly named locations
  • Each suggestion has a latitude and longitude

Advice

• Try to design and implement your solution as you would do for real production code. Show us how you create clean, maintainable code that does awesome stuff. Build something that we'd be happy to contribute to. This is not a programming contest where dirty hacks win the game.
• Documentation and maintainability are a plus, and don't you forget those unit tests.
• We don’t want to know if you can do exactly as asked (or everybody would have the same result). We want to know what you bring to the table when working on a project, what is your secret sauce. More features? Best solution? Thinking outside the box?

Data

Use the cities in the tab separated file data/cities_canada-usa.tsv. You'll need the name, latitude and longitude fields which are indices 1, 4, 5 below:

• geonameid : integer id of record in geonames database
• name : name of geographical point (utf8) varchar(200)
• asciiname : name of geographical point in plain ascii characters, varchar(200)
• alternatenames : alternatenames, comma separated varchar(5000)
• latitude : latitude in decimal degrees (wgs84)
• longitude : longitude in decimal degrees (wgs84)

Sample responses

These responses are meant to provide guidance. The exact values can vary based on the data source and scoring algorithm

Near match

GET /suggestions?q=Londo&latitude=43.70011&longitude=-79.4163

{
  "suggestions": [
    {
      "name": "London, ON, Canada",
      "latitude": "42.98339",
      "longitude": "-81.23304",
      "score": 0.9
    },
    {
      "name": "London, OH, USA",
      "latitude": "39.88645",
      "longitude": "-83.44825",
      "score": 0.5
    },
    {
      "name": "London, KY, USA",
      "latitude": "37.12898",
      "longitude": "-84.08326",
      "score": 0.5
    },
    {
      "name": "Londontowne, MD, USA",
      "latitude": "38.93345",
      "longitude": "-76.54941",
      "score": 0.3
    }
  ]
}

No match

GET /suggestions?q=SomeRandomCityInTheMiddleOfNowhere

{
  "suggestions": []
}

References

• Geonames provides city lists Canada and the USA http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/readme.txt

Getting Started

Begin by cloning this repo.