Graham MacRobie

From time to time, potential clients ask me to complete a “code exercise” or “code challenge”. Typically the intent of these challenges is to ensure that good architecture and coding practices are observed, giving those prospects a way to evaluate my skill and approach. There’s often an opportunity for some collaboration, which lets us both get to know each other a bit too.

I absolutely love these challenges! I look at it as a chance to solve an interesting problem and write some cool code. First and foremost, I am a developer and there’s nothing quite like getting your hands dirty and trying to make something beautiful. Sometimes these challenges afford me the luxury to try out some new technologies, which also helps me keep my skills sharp. And when I’ve been the client or hiring manager, I’ve used code exercises as a tool to help evaluate candidates. Code challenges are a good tool, and I’ve been on both sides of them with good results.

All that being said, I’ve made the decision to decline any further requests for code exercises for the time being, especially for the Salesforce platform. The bottom line is they are time consuming, which means they are expensive for me to produce. As much fun as I have with these challenges, I generally can’t cost-justify the time spent on them.

However, I understand the value in being able to see an example of my code, especially in the context of a code challenge. Accordingly, I’ve published a Salesforce Code Exercise on a public repository on my GitHub. This is an actual code exercise that was submitted to a client and was produced under real time pressure. The README file starts with the challenge specification itself, and then you can read through my design thought process, look at my flowchart of the solution, and see screenshots of the working Salesforce application. You can also browse through the code and see that it is well documented, properly tested, and generally clean.

If you’d like to see a demo of the application live, please just let me know. If you have questions about the code, I’d love to walk you through it. And if you really, really want me to do another code exercise, let’s talk and we’ll see if it makes sense.

I’m looking forward to working with you!