Interview questionThat annoying 3rd party service

time to read 2 min | 268 words

We are still in a hiring mode. And today we have completed a new question for the candidates. The task itself is pretty simple, create a form for logging in or creating a new user.

Seems simple enough, I think. But there is a small catch. We’ll provide you the “backend” for this task, which you have to work with. The interface looks like this:

public interface IUserService
{
        void CreateNewUser(User u);
 
        User GetUser(string userId);
}

public class User
{
   public string Name {get;set;}
   public string Email {get;set;}
   public byte[] Sha1HashedPassword {get;set;}
}

The catch here is that we provide that as a dll that include the implementation for this, and as this is supposed to represent a 3rd party service, we made it behave like that. Sometimes the service will take a long time to run. Sometimes it will throw an error (ThisIsTuesdayException), sometime it will take a long time to run and throw an error, etc.

Now, the question is, what is it that I’m looking to learn from the candidate’s code?

More posts in "Interview question" series:

  1. (29 Sep 2016) Stackoverflow THAT
  2. (30 Mar 2015) fix the index
  3. (27 Aug 2014) That annoying 3rd party service