I had a one-hour Zoom call with an iOS developer from DoorDash. I was emailed a zip file containing an Xcode project. This project included a README, a JSON sample file, and a struct with a getItemData() function that had three lines of code to load the JSON file from disk.

My task was to deserialize the JSON into native Swift objects and then build a UI that displayed the item as specified, including downloading images from URLs.

I was able to deserialize the JSON into native Swift objects without issue, but I got hung up on creating the UI. Although I have many years of UIKit experience, I have been working with SwiftUI for the past few months. When I tried to switch the project to SwiftUI, I first encountered a deployment target issue. I changed that to iOS 15 but then forgot how to integrate SwiftUI into a UIViewController.

By that time, I decided to create a new SwiftUI project and simply drag the resources into it. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and could not get the UI built.

I feel like many of these Silicon Valley companies conduct interviews but don't actually hire. They seem to be looking for engineers who have memorized what's needed to pass a one-hour coding interview.

While building a simple native iOS app is an improvement over LeetCode problems, I am not a fan of this timed method of evaluating skillsets.

Consume the data API by deserializing into native types.

Use your types to populate a UI as specified.