Senior PHP Backend Developer – Coding Assessment

Thank you for taking the time to complete this assessment.
The goal is to demonstrate how you approach architecture, testing, and backend engineering best practices.

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📖 Project: Collaborative Task Management API

Objective

Build a REST API for managing projects, tasks, comments, and notifications.
We value clean architecture, thoughtful design, and code quality over speed or feature quantity.

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✅ Requirements

Core Features

• Authentication: User registration & login (JWT or Laravel Sanctum).
• Projects: CRUD operations. Each project belongs to a user.
• Tasks:
  • CRUD operations.
  • Fields: title, description, status (todo/in-progress/done), due_date.
  • Filtering: by status, due date, full-text search.
  • Pagination for listing.
• Comments: CRUD operations. Each comment belongs to a task.
• Notifications:
  • Triggered when a task is assigned or updated.
  • Delivered asynchronously (e.g., queue).
  • Endpoint for fetching unseen notifications.

Non-Functional

• Use a layered architecture (controllers, services, repositories, domain models).
• Apply at least two meaningful design patterns (e.g., Repository, Strategy, Observer).
• Database migrations must be included.
• Cache task listings (e.g., Redis).
• Add rate limiting for sensitive endpoints.
• Standardized error handling and responses.

Testing

• Unit tests for core services and repositories.
• Integration tests for API endpoints.
• Minimum 70% test coverage.

DevOps

• Dockerfile + docker-compose.yml for local setup.
• CI pipeline runs automatically (tests, static analysis, linting, security).
• Compatible with PHP 8.2+.

Documentation

• Update this README.md to include:
  • Setup instructions.
  • Example API requests (curl/Postman).
  • Explanation of your architectural decisions and trade-offs.
  • Which design patterns you applied, and why.

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🎯 Acceptance Criteria

Your submission will be evaluated on:

• Architecture & Patterns: Separation of concerns, justified design patterns.
• Code Quality & Standards: PSR-12 compliance, maintainability.
• Feature Completeness: Requirements implemented.
• Testing: Coverage, meaningful cases, edge-case handling.
• Documentation: Clear and professional.
• DevOps: CI/CD awareness, Docker setup.

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📝 Commit Guidelines

We value not only the final code but also how you structure your work.
Please use meaningful, structured commit messages throughout your development.

• Follow Conventional Commits style when possible:

  • feat: – for new features
  • fix: – for bug fixes
  • chore: – for setup, configuration, or maintenance
  • test: – for adding or improving tests
  • docs: – for documentation changes

• Examples:

  • chore: initial commit (Laravel project setup)
  • feat: add task CRUD endpoints
  • fix: correct due date validation logic

Your commit history will be reviewed as part of the assessment to understand how you approach iteration, problem-solving, and communication through code.

📦 Submission Instructions

1. Implement your solution inside this repo.
2. Push to a private GitHub repository.
3. Invite the following reviewers with Read role: gh-ewmateam.
4. Please complete within 7 days of receiving the assignment.
5. If you need more time, let us know.

ℹ️ Notes

1. The project is designed to take 3–5 hours. We do not expect a production-ready system.
2. Quality matters more than quantity — partial solutions are acceptable if well-documented.
3. Document anything you would do differently with more time.

Good luck, and thank you again for your effort!