Welcome to the Points developer take-home assignment.
Your task is to build an app against a small API. You can download the docker image onto your computer and run it locally.
Your task is to build an application that queries our dockerized API and displays the calculated total income tax for a given salary and tax year. You may refer to this resource for context on how to calculate total income tax using marginal tax rates.
Please see the official reference to tax brackets and rates for more information.
The goal of this assessment is to provide a picture of your approach to development as it relates to:
- Design patterns/programming paradigm
- Scalability
- API interface design
- Frameworks
- Documentation
- Clean code
- UI
- Testing
- Automated testing
- Error handling
- Logging
- Readability
The application you’re building should have an HTTP API with an endpoint that takes an annual income and the tax year as parameters. The appropriate type of params (query vs body param vs URL etc.) is to be determined by you. Your endpoint should return a JSON object with the result of the calculation.
The application should have a very basic UI with a form that accepts two inputs: annual income and the tax year. On form submission, the UI should print either an error or the total income tax for the inputted parameters. Feel free to use the frontend application framework that you're most comfortable with.
- Fetch the tax rates by year i.e. /tax-calculator/tax-year/[2019|2020|2021|2022]
- Receive a yearly salary
- Calculate and display the total taxes owed for the salary
- Display the amount of taxes owed per band
- Display the effective rate
| Salary | Total Taxes |
|---|---|
| $0 <= | $0 |
| $50,000 | $7,500.00 |
| $100,000 | $17,739.17 |
| $1,234,567 | $385,587.65 |
Please find a sample request at /tax-calculator/, which contains a reliable API endpoint and can be used for test and development purposes. It returns the following JSON response:
{
"tax_brackets": [
{
"min": 0,
"max": 50197,
"rate": 0.15
},
{
"min": 50197,
"max": 100392,
"rate": 0.205
},
{
"min": 100392,
"max": 155625,
"rate": 0.26
},
{
"min": 155625,
"max": 221708,
"rate": 0.29
},
{
"min": 221708,
"rate": 0.33
}
]
}
Be aware that we’ve baked in two errors in our mock API — you may handle them and anything else you see fit to handle accordingly:
- only years 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 are supported
- the API throws errors randomly
These occur on the /tax-calculator/tax-year/2022 endpoint, which your assignment will be evaluated against.
Design the application as you would a production app that you and your team are collaborating on. Your result should not be a proof of concept and should focus more on the assessment criteria listed below than on working code.
In order to run the API locally, please follow these instructions:
docker pull ptsdocker16/interview-test-server
docker run --init -p 5001:5001 -it ptsdocker16/interview-test-serverNavigate to http://localhost:5001. You should be greeted with this set of instructions, and access to the different available endpoints. The following are the relevant endpoints:
- /tax-calculator/ - endpoint to develop against
- /tax-calculator/tax-year/2022 - endpoint you'll be assessed against
If you have any problems or need any sort of clarification, email the engineering hiring manager for assistance.
You can either submit your code as a zip file or send a link to a personal repository. Do not fork or submit pull requests to this repository.
Please be prepared to provide a walkthrough of your solution during the first 45 mins of the technical panel interview.
We respect your time and understand that you may have other commitments. As such, our assignment is designed to be completed in 4 hours or less. Please try to timebox your effort.