Best Repos

A simple app which allows the user to search for repositories on Github and identify top contributors for a given repo, as well as view their profile.

Time spent: 34 hours spent in total

Instructions

In order to utilize the app, one needs to generate their own GitHub access token by following the instructions outlined below: https://github.com/blog/1509-personal-api-tokens

Once the access token has been generated, navigate to the Credentials.plist file and replace your username and password with the relevant information. Until this step is done, you will not be able to query against the GitHub API, and the unit tests will also fail.

User Stories

Required:

• User can browse the top 100 starred repos on GitHub
• User can view the top contributors for each repository

Additional User Facing Stories:

• The user can filter searches based on stars, forks, last time updated and best match
• The user can order the results in ascending/descending order
• The user can visit a top contributor's profile and receive relevant information

Additional Tech Stories:

• Architected the app in such a way that adding any functionality, whether it be for the GitHub API or another external API is extremely streamlined and easily testable
• Added unit testing for all of the backend work (parser, mock provider, real provider, service)
• Seperated out the network request logic, data parsing logic, and added a layer of abstraction over the provider in order to provide the consumer with the best experience
• Created a base class to handle all network requests
• Use class extensions to only give required classes (such as parser and unit testing) access to the underlying mutable accessors of the models - thus improving encapsulation and making the models immutable
• Used the Google Objective-C Style guide: https://google.github.io/styleguide/objcguide.xml
• Explicitly hit the v3 API (future proofing the app)
• Set up the infrastructure to easily switch between real network providers and mock providers with the flip of a switch
  (literally) without introducing any spaghetti code
• Carefully validated and parsed all responses
• Robust error handling around network and auth
• Added an indeterminate progress indicator for when a network request is sent
• The project has no warning and passes the static analyzer entirely
• Added a way to use mock data from save json files so I wouldn't hit the rate limiter

Additional Design Stories:

• Used the following material design palettes across the app: http://www.materialpalette.com/teal/red

Production Ready

Before getting ready for production, I would focus on the following areas more:

• GitHub oAuth Access for the app itself

• Assets would have proper 1x,2x,3x..resolutions, or better yet vector pdf assets

• Fork the third party library used for showing the loading indicator, and add a loading label underneath it. Additionally add the relevant code to support the layer being positioned across multiple bounds (currently it always assumed the device dimensions)

• Additionally, I would remove the limitation to only retrieve the top 100 results, and follow the pagination links GitHub provides to fetch all of the data

• Ensure we resize the images when downloading from the network, before we cache them. Currently, the cache was used as is, but we could modify it to squeeze out some more performance gains

• Ensure we supported rotation

• If bandwidth was a concern, we would not fetch ALL top contributors for each repository call, and lazily load the data instead

High Level Architecture

Video Walkthrough

Browse 100 Repositories

Search for a repository

Search for a few repositories and filter by the relevant criteria.

App running on Mock Data

The app is running on mock data, which is providing a single repository and top contributor. This is beneficial to test the code flows of the app, and allowing us to unit test against expected values.

Invalid GitHub Credentials

The app reacts and displays a message to the user when we have an authentication error with GitHub.

Invalid Network Connection on Launch

The app notifies the user when they do not have a valid network connection, and works whenever their network connection is restored.

Invalid Network Connection Mid Session

The app notifies the user when they lose connection in the middle of a session (when trying to perform a network call) and works correctly whenever their network connection is restored.

Open-source libraries used

• AFNetworking - A delightful networking framework for iOS

  • The underlying network stack is written on top of AFNetworking. We have a BWBaseProvider which handles fetching data from a given endpoint. We utilize AFNetworking because of it's easy of integration, less code written overall, wide adoption, and less time taken to get everything setup.

• XHAmazingLoading A library used for displaying various loading indicators

  • When displaying a loading spinner to the user, we leverage XHAmazingLoading to perform this for us. The primarily purpose of using this library was because I liked the animation it provided. Upon deep diving into the library, there were a couple of issues I would have like to fixed - given more time.

• Haneke A lightweight zero-config image cache for iOS

  • This was primarily used to fetch and cache images asyncronously. I would haved liked to use FastImageCache by path, but did not have the time to write my own networking logic to retrieve the images. Instead, I relied on the configuration-less cache provided by Haneke. If this app was going into production, I would add additional code to modify the Haneke cache to resize images instead of storing them at the full size.

• SCLAlertView-Objective-C Beautiful animated Alert View

  • This was primarily used to surface beautiful alerts to the user. It was extremely simple to intergate, widely adopted, and allowed me to surface errors to the user such as invalid auth or network failure to the user in an elegant manner.