scorpiodawg / hiring-generalist-nooploop

Engineering hiring exercise

Mason Engineering - Generalist Engineer exercise

Noop Looping Command

Your objective is to write a simple command-line tool named nooploop in one of the languages shown below. When run, this tool will simply print Waiting for keypress once every second, but prints Done! and quits back immediately to the invoking shell as soon any key on the keyboard is pressed.

Example

For instance, a run of the program may look like this:

nooploop

Waiting for keypress
(one second passes)
Waiting for keypress
(one second passes)
:
:
Waiting for keypress
(user presses <Enter>)
Done.

Addon 1

If you reach this stage, add a command line parameter -n <sec> to accept as input the number of seconds between pauses.

Example

For instance, a run of this enhanced program may look like this:

nooploop -n 2

Waiting for keypress
(two seconds pass)
Waiting for keypress
(two seconds pass)
:
:
Waiting for keypress
(one second passes)
(user presses <Enter>)
Done.

Addon 2

If you reach this stage, enhance your program to print out upon a keypress, the number of seconds remaining (up to 2 decimal points of precision) before it would print Waiting for keypress again.

Example

For instance, a run of this enhanced program may look like this:

nooploop -n 5

Waiting for keypress
(five seconds pass)
:
:
Waiting for keypress
(just over one second passes)
(user presses <Enter>)
Done, with 3.89 seconds to go.

Submission

You are to build a small program that can be run from the command line as described above.

DOs

• Fork this repo to your own user space, make it private (now possible with free accounts as well), and add @scorpiodawg as an outside collaborator

• Push all changes to the master branch of your fork when your time is up. Do not worry about incomplete work -- different engineers take different lengths of time and this will be accounted for. We will then fork your repo and review your code.

• Use one of the following languages/tools for the exercise:

  • Golang
  • Javascript with NodeJS/TypeScript
  • C/C++
  • Python 2 or 3
  • Java
  • Kotlin

  If you wish to use one of the languages not in this list, please chat with your interviewer first.

• Do include a NOTES.md with any notes worth sharing such as build instructions, and if possible, any significant resources used during development (StackOverflow questions, articles, sites, etc. You do not need to include links to questions about language syntax, for e.g.)

DONTs

• Don't jump right in if you have any doubts as to whether your choice of language/ framework might not be suitable for our review (e.g. less common ones such as Clojure, Fortran, Elixir, etc.). Please clarify with your interviewer first.

All the best!