Change++ 2020 Coding Challenge

Additional information about running the program

There are three ways to run the program:

1. Download the project into IntelliJ IDEA and run from the IDE
2. Download the project, compile it into a jar, and run the jar from the command line
3. Download the jar I compiled for you from here and run it using command line The command you will need is java -jar path-to-the-jar-file-and-name, for example java -jar JarExample.jar

The application will run on localhost:8080.

The overview of the workflow of the application can be found in workflowExplanation.md.

Comments are available both in Java files and Javascript file.

Problem Statement

Before You Begin

Congrats!! You have been selected to engage in the next step of the Change++ interview process. The next step in our application process is completing the following coding project. As we are unable to offer interviews to every applicant, we will use this challenge to evaluate a number of criteria including technical skills and commitment to Change++. We expect this to take between 2-6 hours depending on experience level and technical skills. We recognize that you are all busy, but as a member of a Change++ team it is expected that you will dedicate 4-6 hours every week working on your project; therefore, we believe this is a reasonable timeframe.

What we are looking for

At Change++, our project teams are made up of members ranging from those in their first-year at Vanderbilt to those in graduate programs. We know that you all have varying degrees of technical skills and experience, all of which we will take into account when reviewing your code. Working on a Change++ team, you may often use a new technology that you are not familiar with and have not learned in CS courses at Vanderbilt, but we’re looking to see that you demonstrate the initiative and resourcefulness necessary to learn new skills and complete your work in a timely manner. You should be able to complete this challenge with a combination of basic programming skills (AP CS, 1101, etc.) and online resources.

As far as your code goes, here are a few things we are looking for:

Functionality

As always, the most important criteria is whether or not your code works according to the requirements

Good style

As this is an untimed challenge, we expect a certain level of quality. Be sure to comment and format your code as you might while working on an application for one of our non-profits

Readability and maintainability

This goes along with good style. While you’re coding, keep in mind that other people will be reading and trying to understand your code. Good organization can also help with maintainability, which will be important going forward as we may ask you to elaborate or expand upon your code in future rounds.

The Challenge

Your task is to build a game which tests the user on their ability to differentiate tweets between two individuals: Elon Musk and Kanye West.

Given a tweet by Kanye West or Elon Musk, prompt the user to guess which public figure made the tweet, let the user know if they were correct. Once the user is finished let the user know how accurate they were in their guesses.

You will use the Twitter API found in the Twitter Developer Platform to write a program that accomplishes this. In order to use this API, you’ll need a twitter account.

Here is the guide for using the GET statuses/user_timeline endpoint.

For the purposes of this program, we will only be asking you to use the following endpoint.

Here is a helpful sample request to get 100 tweets from @twitterapi:

GET https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=twitterapi?count=100

You will want to modify this endpoint to get tweets from @elonmusk and @kanyewest.

This endpoint will return a maximum of 3,200 tweets in JSON. We only care about the text property for each tweet object.

Some tweets are retweets, replies, and tag other twitter users, and they are thus not genuine Elon and Kanye. As well, some tweets contain links to videos and images. Please filter the tweets so they do not include any references to other users and URL links. This should be pretty easy to do looking at the text of the string of each tweet.

The game loop for your application should look something like this:

1. When user starts program, load the first 3200 tweets by Elon and Kanye, filtered to not include any links or tags to other twitter users
2. Randomly choose a tweet by Elon or Kanye to give to the user
3. Prompt the user to guess
4. Let the user know if they were correct
5. Repeat steps 1-4
6. Show the user their game statistics

Deliverables

Optional: If you would like, feel free to also include a README.txt. This is helpful if:

• You think we may need any additional information about reading or running your program
• You would like to provide feedback about the project or a reflection on the code you wrote
• You did not finish the exercise but would like to provide some information about what you may have gotten done with more time/experience or where/what you struggled with
• There is anything else you want to tell us!

Bonus

There are many exciting and fun ways to expand this application that we do not require, but we encourage you to try out. These include but are not limited to:

• Allowing the user to enter any 2 twitter handles to play the game
• Show attached images in tweets and clickable links
• Make the application pretty and well designed
• Use AI to create a twitter bot which is a combination between Elon and Kanye - Kanlon, gain a massive following, and become emperor of the world - just kidding ;) or are we 0_0

Tips, Tricks, and Helpful Resources

• Information on HTTP requests: https://restfulapi.net/http-methods/
• There are lots of libraries you can use to help you execute http requests in languages of your choice
• Postman is a great tool for API testing (just create a new get request, type in the endpoint, and you’ll see the format of the response data)
• Getting Started with the Twitter API
• While Change++ encourages collaboration and you are free to discuss this assignment with your peers, we do not recommend completing your code with other applicants. As there are so many possible solutions, we will easily be able to identify code that is too similar, and it will also be a disadvantage to you if you do not understand your code well enough to build upon or explain it in the future.
• Good luck!