I recently had the pleasure of completing a programming task for a job interview for a company, which I will keep nameless for now, but we can say they were on techcrunch within the past 36 hours — and they are a startup.
The position is for a web designer and front-end engineer. I have went through a lot of interviews and really enjoyed the entire process. I was given this project a while back, and decided to show you what I did in about 36 hours.
Keep in mind, I was mostly worried that this thing worked, and looked decent, so I did a few things I know I shouldn’t have done like printing html from a class, etc… but it was much, much quicker. Sorry for those architects out there.
Ok, so lets dig in… Here is the premise, I was told to make a ‘widget’ that displayed names on the left, and email addresses on the right, and when you clicked a drop down it swapped email addresses for phone numbers. I was told I get bonus points for an Ajax-ish solution, and bonus points for a database solution. Well — I did that, and went above and beyond a little more.
I decided since we were going to show emails, it might as well not just display the same emails for everybody, but it should grab your actual contacts, and populate the data dynamically. So, I used the Rapleaf Contact Importer API. You can find more info on that here… Now, that comes with a nifty PHP client library, and It also comes with a pearl library.
At this point, i hit some issue with my code highlighter, so I have decided to just give you a link to the sample, and the download of the zip.
I am the founder of 
