> 1. What is the context? Developing some other software? Is creating a JSON a necessary step to solve some real world problem directly? (If the latter: why?)
So there was a fully functional app and the senior developer designed it in a way where the long term support of the app required a new JSON every so often. Basically it was driven by this JSON and there was only one person who knew how it all worked.
> 2. Why was there only one person able to create JSON? JSON is not difficult. What made it difficult (I'm guessing the scheme, the data structure itself).
There was domain knowledge that was represented in this JSON and only a handful of people really knew how it all worked.
> 3. Consumed in what way? What problem does it solve?
This JSON would be a representation of a product that was sold and it was reused over and over by other people. Basically it was a glorified calculator that took this JSON and computed an output.
> 4. What has been tried to solve the problem?
There wasn't a solution to a problem, we were tasked of creating a new version of the app that made it so more than one person was responsible for building these JSON payloads.
> If I was the interviewer I would also think that you aren't interested in thinking about the use case and never/rarely ask why yourself. So I would think you may provide good solutions to a problem on a technical level but not be able to solve a real world problem someone has - which is what software development actually is about. I would then characterize you as a code monkey.
The use case that the app was not intuitive it required 30 inputs and took forever to train someone to proficiently use it. We were tasked with creating a simpler version.
> Well, that part of the sentence makes sense and is imo well placed. Please end it here, because
that made a series of forms and validation so that anybody can compose this object.
again doesn't make a lot of sense in that context.
We used Angular, and depending on the instance fed into the view by the factory it would know which form to generate with the corresponding validation on each form field.
This was only one use case in the overall architecture of the application. The JSON created would be used in other parts of the app as well. All of my responses were on my phone so that's the reason why I couldn't go into full detail.