Odd coding assignment as part of an interview

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I’ve been applying to some front-end jobs trying to find my first job in the tech industry. Had a startup from Angel List reply to me and give me a coding assignment as part of the weeding out process. The assignment is ambiguous and I don’t really know what to make of it.

Here’s the specs:

Thank you for your interest in Outernets. For our Creative Technologist role we are inviting candidates to complete a coding assignment:

Please design and create an interactive experience using web technologies (html, css, javascript, or any other tool you think will get the job done) that will demonstrate your thinking and process from conception to execution. It does not have to be complex, but it needs to show merit and potential. The app UX should not use a keyboard or mouse.

We are leaving this assignment open-ended because we want to see your creativity in addition to your ability to code. However, if you need a starting point here are some things we like:

  • Buttonless/mouseless interactivity
  • 3D, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality
  • Live video processing

We know that applying to jobs is a busy process, so please don’t spend more than a day or two in total on this task. Ideally your project can be deployed, but if you don’t have this option, you should at least provide a link to your code repository and instructions for running it locally.

Let us know if you have any questions and we look forward to seeing your work. Have a great day and good luck!

Anybody have any ideas in terms of what they’re looking for me to make? I’m not sure I understand the tasks or the idea of buttonless/mouseless web design. It sounds to me like maybe they want me to make an animation but I’m not sure.

I know HTML/CSS/JS and React pretty well, but I have zero experience with animation (outside of anime.js, waypoint.js, i.e. basic JS libraries that can do small animations). I’m not sure if I could make any complex animations and that wasn’t listed on the job requirements.

Any idea of how I should approach this?

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I read “Buttonless/mouseless” as “mobile first”. Examples, imo, are things like swiping right, Page or app movement based on geo or gyro position, voice commands for control, autoplay/slide based pages, action based on video feed trigger(color, luminosity or recognized polygon “triggered events” [like when facial rec changes photo settings when it sees an oval with eyes, or when a smile triggers a snapshot -original idea- whenever the video feed recognizes a quadrangle, it fills it with company logo “augmented reality style”])

As far as what that means for you to create, I’m far too early to give much more direction(Day 8/100). I hope I helped a little. Good luck!:slight_smile:

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check this out

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Just to add to @Jerami reply, there are a number of web apis and technologies that are available right now (for modern browsers) to do a lot of interesting stuff. Here’s a list of them:

Just skimming over all the things available should give you some ideas of what you could do.

I personally would try to keep things simple (they said spend a day or two), and stick to what you do know to a point. Unfortunately idk if a React app could use most of the fancier apis.

PS. I would also thing of things you can do on a mobile device, like gyro access, mic related, or VR. Loads of ideas there :smiley:

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