Fetch Coding Interview Challenge

Prepared for the first interaction/coding interview for Fetch on 9-24-24.

Overview

This is based on a request from the hiring manager/technical recruiter and my first interaction after an application at Fetch.

The problem statement can be found here in ./health-check.pdf. And can be found on the internet at large here: https://fetch-hiring.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/site-reliability-engineer/health-check.pdf

Bash? Really?

Yes. Bash. :) I don't really love coding interviews in general. But, I felt like trying to make it fun today. I could have chosen Python or Golang, but for pure speed of hackery(and a challenge) I chose bash.

When would this not be Bash?

If this was a real problem that we needed to solve where we would want to maintain and add features over time. Especially if my team doesn't love bash. Another reason to "scale it up to something else" would be if there were more, or more complicated, http checks. Using the example input file(./input.yaml), it was easy enough to manage with bash. But as you scale up the quality of the problem, Bash becomes less and less appealing.

Walkthrough

I tried to comment what my reasoning was throughout the script. I would be happy to answer any questions and/or learn about how I could be more clear in my code/comments.

Example usage

I wrote this on my Ubuntu 22 machine. I have been using Ubuntu as my workstation/only OS for 14 years or so now. I didn't add any OS checks, so I am not 100% sure it will work on Mac. Specifically, I am not sure about how I am using sed and date and if that will play nice on a BSD based system? Sorry.

My brother took it for a spin on a Mac and did find some problems. I think they are related to the versions of yq/jq. Here is what I am using for reference;

$ yq --version
yq (https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/) version v4.44.3
$ jq --version
jq-1.7.1

Hopefully this helps if you are trying to run this monstrosity.

Here is the output of me running it.

$ ./healthCheck.sh input.yaml 
fetch.com has 67% availability percentage
www.fetchrewards.com has 0% availability percentage
fetch.com has 67% availability percentage
www.fetchrewards.com has 0% availability percentage
fetch.com has 60% availability percentage
www.fetchrewards.com has 0% availability percentage
fetch.com has 67% availability percentage
www.fetchrewards.com has 0% availability percentage
^C