Fun and unusual problem, though the interview was much quieter than any technical interview I had experienced before. It felt closer to completing an online coding assessment while an interviewer silently observed.
The challenge involved making HTTP requests to “escape a maze.” You loaded a webpage containing links to connected child pages and traversed them to locate the exit. As the exercise progressed, additional response types, body formats, and URL schemes introduced new cases that had to be discovered and handled.
The interviewer provided very little clarification when I tried to discuss requirements, so the exercise appeared to be testing your ability to reverse engineer an unfamiliar system and adapt your design as new behavior emerged. I was also discouraged from consulting documentation, so I would recommend being comfortable using your language’s HTTP request library from memory.
My initial design assumed successful responses, and I later expanded it to support different response codes, bodies, and schemes. Overall, it was a creative problem, but candidates should expect limited communication and deliberately undisclosed requirements.