USDS Engineering Take-Home Assessment

Purpose

The United States Federal Government has over 200,000 pages of federal regulations across ~150 main agencies, all of which can be found within the eCFR at https://www.ecfr.gov/. There is a public API for it. The goal of this assessment is to create a simple website to analyze Federal Regulations to allow for more digestible and actionable insights to be made on potential deregulation efforts across the government.

Instructions

1. We designed all components of this assignment to be completed between 4 and 6 hours, excluding setup, but please take more time if needed.

2. Please write code to download the current eCFR data, store the data server-side, create APIs that can retrieve the server-side stored data, and provide a UI to analyze it for items such as word count per agency, historical changes over time, and a checksum for each agency.

   • Only implement analysis that would provide meaningful information to the user.
   • Please add at least one of your own custom metrics that you believe may help inform decision-making more effectively.

3. There should be a way for users to review the results.

4. Please submit this assignment via KiteWorks by the deadline your USDS Recruiter provided. If you have questions or need more time, please let your Recruiter know.

• You will receive a separate email with a KiteWorks link – please check your spam folder if you do not see it. * Please contact us if you do not receive the KiteWorks link within 24 hours of receiving this email.
  • When submitting, please include the following:
    • Zip file containing source code (please ensure that the zip file can be extracted properly before sending).
    • Document including:
      • Feedback on the assignment, including any comments you may want to add on how your expertise / skillsets fit this assessment.
      • Duration it took you to complete it.
      • Link to frontend, if applicable.
      • Screenshots of your UI.

Thank you and we look forward to reviewing your submission.

NOTES: API documentation: https://www.ecfr.gov/developers/documentation/api/v1

Feedback

Clear objective, realistic scope, allowed me to demonstrate full stack skills with a real API and meaningful data. The main challenge was with the eCFR API reliability when fetching historical data. Many requests timed out (504 errors), running a full historical import took to long complete.

Deployed:

https://usds-hywt.onrender.com/