What I do With Coding Tests

You know the 3 links on my homepage 

1. novelscope.org
2. games.tbrantleyii.dev
3. keymetrics11.app

There’s a story behind these projects. They aren’t random experiments I threw together one afternoon. Each of them started as a technical assessment I completed while interviewing for jobs earlier in my career.

I keep an archive of those take home tests. From time to time, I revisit them and make a decision: either keep the project because I enjoyed it and continue building on it, or discard it entirely because I never want to see that test again. Some of them eventually become open source. At the moment, games.tbrantleyii.dev and users.tbrantleyii.dev fall into that category, though that may change. Games might not stay open source, and users may get a new URL once I settle on a better name.

None of these projects retain their original identity from the initial tests. They had to change in order to become functional and usable applications. Novelscope began as a basic CRUD style app, but it couldn’t remain that way since you can’t meaningfully edit CRUD APIs. Games started as a full Node.js server, but I rebuilt it as a Vue application to reduce hosting costs. I’ll talk about KeyMetrics in a bit 😉.

I could have let these projects sit untouched and slowly rot, but over time they became a simple way to demonstrate my experience. Novelscope shows that I work with Vite and React. Games shows Vue. KeyMetrics shows Go. For someone who’s a polyglot and often hears “there’s no way you know all these languages,” this is my answer: yes, I do, and here are the applications I’ve built and actively maintain.

To wrap this up, the reason I’m writing this post is to announce keymetrics11.app, formerly user.tbrantleyii.dev. What started as a glorified CRUD application with a user table has evolved into a tool that compares different ID types, including UUID, ULID, CUID, Snowflake, and NanoID. It runs real metrics to explore which IDs are more efficient and which perform faster.

There’s a dashboard to visualize everything, so go check it out 🙂