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https://github.com/maxmind/dev-hire-homework

A homework exercise for engineering applicants
https://github.com/maxmind/dev-hire-homework

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A homework exercise for engineering applicants

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README 

          
Please note that while this is a relatively simple matter of programming, we

are particularly interested in seeing the design of your solution. We will

evaluate your code not only based on correctness but also based on design,

simplicity, and organization. Pretend this is code being written to go into

production.



The given log file is a standard log file in the [Apache combined log

format](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/logs.html#combined) (with referrer

information stripped out). You will write code to parse this file and generate

a report which breaks down some of the information based on the country and US

state where visitors came from. Please include any tests you wrote along the

way as well.



Although we primarily use Go and Perl, you may write the code in your preferred

language. You are also encouraged to use any third-party libraries you like.

However, you must deliver the result in a way that allows us to run the code on

a standard Ubuntu system. That means either packaging up all of your

dependencies or giving us very clear instructions on how to install them.

Unless the language you choose is Go or Perl, assume that we do not know

anything about the package management tools for that language! We will run your

code to look at the output, as well as looking at the code itself.



Include instructions on how to run the code, either as the output of

`your-command --help` or as a separate README.md file. Your instructions should

tell us how to specify the access log file to parse, as well as how to specify

the MaxMind GeoLite2 City database to use. This can either be done via

command-line flags or by telling us where to put these files relative to your

script.



The code you write should use one of the available GeoIP2 APIs to get

geographical information about the IP addresses in the log. See [our developer

site](https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/docs/databases?lang=en#api-clients) for

details on the available APIs. Feel free to use either an official API or a

third-party one. **You must use one of the APIs linked from this page.** Use

the [GeoLite2 City

database](https://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geolite2-free-geolocation-data) as your

MaxMind database. **Do NOT use the GeoLite2 web service.**



Include a command-line program to run your code against an arbitrary file. The

output of that program should be a report in the format of your choice. Don't

worry too much about making this fancy. Printing lightly formatted text to the

console is fine (so is an HTML page).



Ignore all requests for images, CSS, and JavaScript. This is any request path

beginning with:



* `/[a-f0-9]+/css/`

* `/[a-f0-9]+/images/`

* `/[a-f0-9]+/js/`

* `/entry-images/`

* `/images/`

* `/user-images/`

* `/static/`

* `/robots.txt`

* `/favicon.ico`



Please note that the first three path prefixes are regular expressions. The

remaining are plain text.



Also ignore all paths ending in `.rss` or `.atom`.



The report itself should show the following information:



* Top 10 countries by number of page views

  * include the name of the country in English and the number of page views

    from that country

  * sort the results by number of page views (most to least)

  * for each country show the page *other than `/`* that visitors from that

    country viewed the most

* Top 10 US states, ignoring visitors outside the US

  * same as above for output



**For the purposes of this code, "the page" is the path including the query

string.**



If there are less than 10 states or countries with visitors, only show those

which have at least one visitor.



Note that the GeoLite2 data file may simply not have all the relevant

information on some IP addresses. In this case, assign the page views to a

state or country of "unknown" as needed.



## How Long Should It Take?



We've created this exercise with the expectation that it take approximately 2

hours. You're welcome to spend longer if you judge it appropriate, but we want

to be respectful of your time.



## Sharing Your Code with Us



We do not want your answer to be publicly available on the Internet for anyone

to find. You can share your code with us in one of several ways:



* Make a private repo on GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab, and share it with us. We

  will tell you who to invite to the repo when we ask you to do this homework.

* Send us an email with a zip or tarball attachment. You can send this to your

  HR contact at MaxMind.



## Copyright



This repository is copyright MaxMind 2014-2021. You may distribute it under the

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).