How to Assess Coding Skills specific to PHP and Laravel?

Hee hee,

In general, it's hard to hire the correct people right away. It's impossible to always hire the best or the right person. So you have to accept that you might make a mistake with this at some point. But that is good. You learn from those experiences ;)

I would personally not like a code assessment call where my interviewer would be watching me code. In general, when a developer is working they do it on their own. There might be some pairing from time to time or some discussion about how to solve something but in the end, the code is written on their own.

The company where I work also has a coding challenge. However, we let the person do this at home in their own time. We tell them to take around 2 to 3 hours to work on it. After that, they send us what they have and we look at that. The coding challenge itself has some challenges with an API. We leave the user free to set up a nice frontend and write tests for it. Based on those decisions we can already see what kind of coder this is. We review the code and then discuss it with the candidate. Maybe give some feedback or ask about how things can be solved differently if there was more time. They didn't complete the challenge but added tests for the most important parts, well that is way better than a person who spends two hours on some CSS to make it look good

You can find our code challenge below and you can use it for your own purposes ;) Let me know if you have any questions.

Laravel Coding Challenge

To do a small Laravel check-up we have thought out the following challenge for you. In general, this challenge should be completable in around 2 hours. It’s not a big issue if you take longer or don’t finish on time. The goal is to get a clear view of how you think and work.

The challenge

The challenge will contain a few core features most applications have. That includes connecting to an API, basic MVC, exposing an API, and finally tests.

The API we want you to connect to is https://kanye.rest/

The application should have the following features

• A web page that shows 5 random Kayne West quotes (must)
• There should be a button to refresh the quotes (must)
• Authentication for this page should be done with a password (must)
• An API route should be available to fetch 5 random Kayne West quotes (must)
• The API route is secured with a token (nice to have)
• Above features are tested with Feature tests (must)
• Above features are tested with Unit tests (nice to have)
• Provide a README on we can set up and test the application (must)

Notes

• HTML/CSS/JS styling is not part of this, it doesn’t matter how it looks like.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I agree that you learn from past mistakes, but taking a few steps to make sure you make fewer in the begining is also wise. Minimizing wasted funds and time is my goal right now. Thanks for the challenge example, btw. I'll even try it myself. Shouldn't take more than 20 minutes to complete even with a few quick peeks to manuals/internet.

You also mentioned that you give the challenge to applicants to complete as homework. This looks like a good way for false-positives. You hire and then discover that the person cheated... fire them and start all over?

@laracastsluvr Well, yeah we fire them and start over. However, we always discuss the code with the person itself, so if they cheated we will notice it right away. They won't be able to explain what the code is doing or how to implement a different solution. We also put some trust in people. You can't know anything.

If you did the challenge in 20minutes, you probably didn't write many tests. I would be very curious to see your implementation ;)

@bobbybouwmann Hello,

Sorry for the late reply.

Yeah, I haven't given it a try yet. And you're totally right, I don't do TDD unfortunately (and unforgivably). I do rapid prototyping and then refactor stuff.

But I've given it some thought and you're once again right. If they cheat they wouldn't be able to explain much of what the code does. So I figured I should create a "challenge" that has a lot to do with my codebase already.

I'm thinking that a good challenge would be to create a URL shortener service.

• A page to create new short urls.
• A success page shown after creating a new short URL displaying the short version.
• A page to register/login. (Auth with password)
• A manager type page for logged in users where:
• • URLs can be retrieved (list page, view, edit, delete, disable)
• URLs need to expire with email notification (push would be nice)
• Shortened URLs need an "exit" page that redirects to the actual URL
• REST API, optional nice to have.
• Redirect/Exit analytics... really optional nice to have

No styling required, a default browser input field with a submit button and simple tabular views for "dashboard" to edit/delete/view URLs of logged in users.

The above challenge would cover The Basics, Security, and some stuff from Digging Deeper from Laravel documentation. It doesn't cover interfacing with external APIs, tho.

What do you think? Feasible within 2-3 hours ?

@bobbybouwmann Hello, any thoughts? Sorry for bumping

@laracastsluvr I think an URL shortener service makes sense, but you should probably already setup a basic repository where only the real code needs to be added, not the boiler plate. I think it's pretty tight in 2-3 hours for some developers.

You can of course just try it out and see what happens :)

I did setup a "boilerplate" project for this skills assessment test. The candidate has only to git clone the repo and follow the instructions.

I've done 1 assessment so far with one candidate. At the end he thought it was a great Laravel skill assessment test, because it covered quickly lots of Laravel features that require minimal logic but a lot of how laravel works.