Parallax

To start your Phoenix server:

• Run mix setup to install and setup dependencies

• Rename dev.local.env.example to dev.local.env, and copy your API key using the format shown in that file.

• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server or inside IEx with iex -S mix phx.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

Ready to run in production? Please check our deployment guides.

Notes

• I have sketched out an application that lets a user select a user, generate quotes, and make orders.

• To avoid excessive calls to the external API, I chose to manage state within the application using some OTP functionality versus creating a local database and using Ecto schemas, which would have been an alternative approach. Given the dynamic nature of the data from the external API, I felt that mirroring this using a local database was unnecessary and could be better modeled as follows.

I created a GenServer-based cache to contain user data. Quotes and Orders are modeled as GenServer processes. Quote and Order uniqueness is guaranteed using a Registry (when fetching or updating quote data via the external API, we don't want to duplicate those that have already been instantiated as GenServer processes).

• That being said, a local database would be one way to securely manage user API tokens.