spacebetween / poker-dev-exercise

Coding exercise for potential hires

Space Between Developer Exercise

Hello, if you've been sent this link then we would like to better understand how you work, to do this we'd like you to undertake a small assignment.

At Space Between, we mainly use node backend services and a variety of frontend tech and this assignment has been created to help us assess your proficiencies across these areas.

The task is to complete the functionality required to play an online game of 5 Card Draw Poker. The game is part way complete, and the tasks outlined below should allow it to be played by multiple players.

It should only take a few hours and there's no deadline. You won't be judged on the completion time, so there's no rush, just let us know once it's completed.

We'd like to see how you write code so try to keep it simple, but don't be afraid to add any features you think are missing or would be helpful. Please send us a link to your github repository once the task is complete.

We're looking forward to seeing what you produce! Thanks for your time.

Project Setup

• Fork the exercise repo in github into your own github account, and then checkout a local copy.
• Run npm install to grab the dependencies.
• npm run start will start the server, and you can view the WIP at http://localhost:3000

To test the game (as two players) you will need to open two browser windows (one in incognito mode) as it uses cookies to identify each player. Then you should be able to play against yourself.

Exercise Tasks

The game is 5 Card drawer poker. Each player receives 5 cards, they are then able to select one or more of those cards to discard, and then these cards are replaced with new ones. Once every player has exchanged their cards then the player with the best poker hand wins.

We are using the http://deckofcardsapi.com/ to create a shuffled deck of cards, and then request cards from that deck which are then assigned to each player.

Part 1

Existing functionality: You can create a new game, or join an existing game, and the server requires all players to have joined before proceeding to fetching cards.

To do: From the client side, make an AJAX request to /games/${gameId}/cards, adding the javascript required to the game view page. Jquery has been loaded in the head of the page so this can be used to make the request. This will return the current users cards in this format:

[
  {
    "images": {
      "svg": "https://deckofcardsapi.com/static/img/4H.svg",
      "png": "https://deckofcardsapi.com/static/img/4H.png"
    },
    "code": "4H",
    "value": "4",
    "suit": "HEARTS",
    "image": "https://deckofcardsapi.com/static/img/4H.png"
  },
  {
    "images": {
      "svg": "https://deckofcardsapi.com/static/img/9D.svg",
      "png": "https://deckofcardsapi.com/static/img/9D.png"
    },
    "code": "9D",
    "value": "9",
    "suit": "DIAMONDS",
    "image": "https://deckofcardsapi.com/static/img/9D.png"
  },
  ...
]

Render the cards returned from the API on the page, matching the layout of the designs below:

Part 2

Add a route and handler which processes the exchange process. It should fetch the number of cards needed from the deckofcards api, then replace the selected cards with the new ones. The player state should also be updated to set the exchanged flag to true. The cards view can be displayed again to show the player their new hand.

Part 3

Once all the players have exchanged their cards they will already get directed to the results page. You will need to integrate an existing library to work out which player has the winning hand. On the results page display the current users hand and the winning hand.