Design an API endpoint that provides auto-complete suggestions for large cities. The suggestions should be restricted to cities in the USA and Canada with a population above 5000 people.
- the endpoint is exposed at
/suggestions
- the partial (or complete) search term is passed as a querystring parameter
q
- the caller's location can optionally be supplied via querystring parameters
latitude
andlongitude
to help improve relative scores - the endpoint returns a JSON response with an array of scored suggested matches
- the suggestions are sorted by descending score
- each suggestion has a score between 0 and 1 (inclusive) indicating confidence in the suggestion (1 is most confident)
- each suggestion has a name which can be used to disambiguate between similarly named locations
- each suggestion has a latitude and longitude
- all functional tests should pass (additional tests may be implemented as necessary).
- the final application should be deployed to Heroku.
- feel free to add more features if you like!
These responses are meant to provide guidance. The exact values can vary based on the data source and scoring algorithm
Near match
GET /suggestions?q=Londo&latitude=43.70011&longitude=-79.4163
{
"suggestions": [
{
"name": "London, ON, Canada",
"latitude": "42.98339",
"longitude": "-81.23304",
"score": 0.9
},
{
"name": "London, OH, USA",
"latitude": "39.88645",
"longitude": "-83.44825",
"score": 0.5
},
{
"name": "London, KY, USA",
"latitude": "37.12898",
"longitude": "-84.08326",
"score": 0.5
},
{
"name": "Londontowne, MD, USA",
"latitude": "38.93345",
"longitude": "-76.54941",
"score": 0.3
}
]
}
No match
GET /suggestions?q=SomeRandomCityInTheMiddleOfNowhere
{
"suggestions": []
}
- All code should be written in Ruby
- Mitigations to handle high levels of traffic should be implemented
- Work should be submitted as a pull-request to this repo
- Documentation and maintainability is a plus
- Geonames provides city lists Canada and the USA http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/readme.txt
- http://www.sinatrarb.com/
Begin by forking this repo and cloning your fork. GitHub has apps for Mac and Windows that make this easier.
Get started by installing rbenv
and ruby-build
.
For OS X users, this will require the Xcode Command Line tools and a few Homebrew packages. Details here.
Once that's done run
rbenv install 2.0.0-p247
followed by
rbenv shell 2.0.0-p247
In the project directory run
gem install bundler
followed by
bundle install
(You may need to run rbenv rehash
if the bundle
command is unavailable).
The test suite can be run with
bundle exec rspec
To start a local server run
bundle exec thin start
which should produce output similar to
Using rack adapter
Thin web server (v1.6.1 codename Death Proof)
Maximum connections set to 1024
Listening on 0.0.0.0:3000, CTRL+C to stop