BACKEND TEST 1
Submitted by: Mitchell Sullivan
Intro
This is basically my first-ever project in Go. As such, it's quite simple and bears little resemblance to the hulking behemoth I'd have wrought in .NET. But, hey, isn't that the whole point of Go?
Because I'm a novice in this language, there are some sacrifices, but I thought that the trade-off of using Array's technology was worth it. This project lacks demonstrations of more advanced practices with which I am familiar in other languages, like dependency injection and exhaustive unit testing. Proper commenting and git commits fell by the wayside while I focused on learning, as did a certain degree of polish.
Directions
To run the app, just make sure that port 8099 is free on your machine, or change HOST_PORT in the .env file, and run docker-compose up.
A Postman collection is included in docs, as well an OpenApi 3.0 spec.
In Postman, after signing up, logging in, or refreshing, the token will need be retrieved from the response body and set as the Bearer token with the Authorization header.
Design
Login is facilitated via a JWT that expires in 1 hour. For the sake of a minimum viable product, I have NOT implemented a separate refresh token with a longer expiry time; the unexpired JWT will need to be used in a refresh request within the hour in order to obtain a new one, and the old one will be revoked.
Logout and token revocation are facilitated via a blacklist, stored in Redis, with a time-to-live of 1 hour, since the JWT would become invalid after that time, anyway.
I gave Redis a replica, probably out of insecurity over my experience level with Go and the desire to show off more skills. I had originally set up and was developing for a cluster, but even the Redis docs state that clustering is a clunky experience within Docker containers, so I chose something simpler.
The Gin web framework was chosen due to its popularity and the preponderance of examples which use it.
PostgreSQL is the database instead of MS SQL Server due to MSSQL's lack of initialization options when using docker (setup scripts basically require building a new container), and Postgres supports automatic database creation and an init directory for scripts.
The app uses GORM, an ORM, for data access; there is code for automatic migration to create the relevant table(s), but, since this exercise requires the inclusion of such DDL, the script is located at docker-vols/pg_init/setup.sql and is run on database startup, preventing the migration. For the primary key of Users, I've used a ULID (generated in-app), instead of a UUID vX, for improved indexing and because it seemed more appropriate for use as a JWT claim than a serial integer.
Thank you!
I'm on a rather arduous leg of my career-journey, so I would greatly appreciate any feedback or tips. Since my experience has been rather broad, I'd be willing to "start over" as a junior engineer in order to focus my skillset.
All the best,
MS
