Pingpong

An app to reserve a single ping pong table via Slack commands

*In response to Scott Gifford's poor performance on a white board interview with Jon Frankel, Benjamin Xia-Reinert.

Things to note:

• I built this over a weekend from memory, so I'm sure I got a business rule or two wrong.
• I haven't deployed it, so it isn't actually integrated with Slack yet.
• I've only interacted with the code through phpunit.
• The test suite should define all relevant features of the app.

How to run locally

1. Clone repository
2. Run cd pingpong, cp .env.example .env, composer install, php artisan key:generate
3. Finally run phpunit

Definitions

• User: An entity related to the Slack channel's user, via their unique username.
• Game: An entity that consists of a start timestamp and an end timestamp. Relates to a User via a pivot table (many:many), the number of users per game is restricted in the Game model. The reason it's restricted in the code (and not the database) is so, in the future, you can add things like 2v2 games.
  • Open Game (scope): A game that has not started yet started_at is null and has one user attached.
  • Game in Progress (scope): A game that has two users, has started started_at is not null, and has not ended yet ended_at is null.

*Game scopes will have to be redefined once you expand the users per game passed two. There will likely need to be more explicit booleans and functionality to accomplish that feature.

How to use (On Slack)

There are two ways to interact with the app. One way is to initiate a game /looking and the second is to /join an existing/open game.

/looking

There are a few things that can happen when you send the /looking command:

• If your user doesn't exist, it will create it using your Slack username.
• If there is already an open game, you will join that one.
• If there are no open games it will initiate your game.

/join

• If there are no open games, you get this message "No available games." and you'll have to wait.
• If there is an open game, you join it.
• Once you join an open game a 30 minute countdown will start, when that countdown reaches 0 the game will end.

Potential future features

As I was building this out I couldn't help but think of some cool features that I would enjoy using (and building), so I thought I'd jot them down. Some of them are more feasible than others and would have to be prioritized based on scope and need.

• /startgame and /endgame endpoints.
• Score values and endpoints on the games table, to be updated when the game has ended.
  • /leaderboard endpoint.
  • Tournament bracketing, with seeding based on the leaderboard. There's definitely a lot to unpack here.
• Leave the 30 minute timer but make it a reminder to end the game and leave a score.
• Add ability to manage multiple tables/games going at once.
  • This could would get hairy to manage as a pure Slack app. Maybe it would work to have a channel for each table?
• Scheduled games, something like /join in 25 minutes, or /looking at 4:30pm.

Conclusion

I felt I wasn't able to represent myself very well in the online whiteboard interview. I hope this shows that I have a grasp on data modeling, building APIs, OOP, and PHP/Laravel. That being said, even this project is limited and is intended to show competence, not a full functioning production ready app. There are decision made here to simply show knowledge/execution of features and patterns that I may have reconsidered in a production app. For example, instead of automatically ending a game at 30 minutes via a queued job, I would likely write a third /endgame endpoint (see above).