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Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

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Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#171

Post by wturner »

roneesh wrote: post #167
wturner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing Javascript for a few years and recently answered a few StackOverflow questions. One was regarding "this".If anyone wants to hire my ass feel free to contact me. One of my techniques for learning has been by going on interviews and flopping, then going back and learning all the interview question material on my own time. Wash and repeat.I've been doing this bullshit since the first day I started teachi…

I found this heartening. I've recently transitioned from Mechanical Engineering to Web Dev and am beginning to interview. Just had my first interview, and I feel like everything discussed made me better.

I literally make an ass out of myself half the time. Feel free to join in. You're not alone.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#172

Post by jfarmer »

badman_ting wrote: post #58
byroot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always include something around `this` behaviour in my interviews if the position is Javascript related. You cannot possibly have a decent experience in JS without have been bit by this. And I'm always amazed by the amount of developers that just do not understand how it works, and bind every possible methods.

Anyone who claims to know JS and doesn't have "this" down cold is either a disaster waiting to happen, or a disaster in progress.

Sorry, but the semantics of "this" in JavaScript are crazy — and I think that's being generous. There are a few common use cases that trip people up, e.g., situations where "this" becomes bound to another object like the global window object, and I'd expect an experienced JavaScript programmer to know those.

It depends on what you mean by "down cold," obviously, but if your standard is "either they have the semantics of the 'this' keyword down cold or they're incompetent" then virtually all JavaScript programmers I know (including myself) are incompetent.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#173

Post by wturner »

steven777400 wrote: post #131
wturner wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing Javascript for a few years and recently answered a few StackOverflow questions. One was regarding "this".If anyone wants to hire my ass feel free to contact me. One of my techniques for learning has been by going on interviews and flopping, then going back and learning all the interview question material on my own time. Wash and repeat.I've been doing this bullshit since the first day I started teachi…

If you're looking, we are still hiring for a third position (we've been on a bit of a binge lately with hiring). http://agency.governmentjobs.com/washington/default.cfm?acti...

Thanks. I'll fill it all out in the next 24 hours

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#174

Post by handojin »

p3drosola wrote: post #163
hawkharris wrote: post #31

One problem is that many people associate front-end development mainly with HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are not programming languages. I say this a front-end developer who has to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript on a daily basis. Yes, strictly speaking, HTML and CSS may be considered programming languages, but they lack control structures, design patterns and other interesting tenants of computer science. Like the autho…

I agree completely. At the company I work for, we develop a complex client-side js app. We've got "backenders" who write Ruby, "frontenders" who write CSS + HTML, and "middlenders" who write really fucking awesome javascript.

Obviously effete. The only real point of distinction is where to open the egg and the answer is never 'middle'.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#175

Post by kika »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #164
drgath wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. I recently finished Effective JavaScript, and found it to be an excellent and insightful read.

I'll 4th this recommendation thread for those still on the fence. This and also Secrets of the Javascript Ninja.

I hate HN. Instead of watching action flicks on flights I now read books picked up from HN threads. I've got Platinum Medallion this year and I'm still behind my reading queue.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#176

Post by kika »

philipwalton wrote: post #45
hawkharris wrote: post #31

One problem is that many people associate front-end development mainly with HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS are not programming languages. I say this a front-end developer who has to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript on a daily basis. Yes, strictly speaking, HTML and CSS may be considered programming languages, but they lack control structures, design patterns and other interesting tenants of computer science. Like the autho…

Post author here. I agree 100% that HTML and CSS are not programming languages. However, any application that you build on the front-end is going to require your JavaScript code to interact with the HTML and CSS, so a solid understanding of how all the pieces fit together is crucial. I can't tell you how many times I've seen back-end engineers hack together a 100+ line JavaScript solution to a problem when one line o…

Any book recommendation? I can say I know JS as a language sufficiently well (I can write basically anything on Node), but I almost completely lack a systematic understanding how the HTML+CSS and DOM work together (layout engine, rendering, etc). I have some basic knowledge here and there, but reading "We need to make outside div relative to be able to use absolute on the inner one" leaves me staring out of the window.

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#177

Post by sergiotapia »

krsunny wrote: post #74
Jgrubb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More ridiculous than asking CS questions of a front end dev. I'm a self-taught front-end dev who has flunked numerous interviews because of a lack of CS degree and being able to get through the sorting algorithm questions. I then went home and have spent lots and lots of time teaching myself those fundamentals, if only to interview better. Those fundamentals have made me a vastly better front end dev, able to efficie…

Can you give some examples of which algorithm have been the most relevant/helpful?

His silence is highly amusing to me. :)

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#178

Post by drgath »

krsunny wrote: post #74
Jgrubb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More ridiculous than asking CS questions of a front end dev. I'm a self-taught front-end dev who has flunked numerous interviews because of a lack of CS degree and being able to get through the sorting algorithm questions. I then went home and have spent lots and lots of time teaching myself those fundamentals, if only to interview better. Those fundamentals have made me a vastly better front end dev, able to efficie…

Can you give some examples of which algorithm have been the most relevant/helpful?

I was recently asked a "making change" question [1] in a front-end interview, and once I finally understood it, it really really helped my comprehension of how to properly dissect tree-recursion-branching problems. Here's the code, https://gist.github.com/derek/8073844.

Another one that popped up in an interview was sub-string matching, which I bombed, but after learning Boyer-Moore-Horspool I have a much greater understanding of efficiently designing algorithms. It is the algorithm some browsers use under the hood for String.prototype.indexOf [3]. Here's that code, https://gist.github.com/derek/8035740.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change-making_problem

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore%E2%80%93Hor...

[3] http://javascriptrules.com/2009/08/12/string-searching-algor...

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#179

Post by barrkel »

steven777400 wrote: post #33

We were hiring a non-senior full-stack developer recently and I noticed there were no "frontend" questions on the list, so I added what I thought would be a question that any developer with frontend experience could answer, and would also pave the way for some more interested discussions for an advanced candidate. The question was something to the effect of "In JavaScript, what is the value of 'this' in a method?" I…

You can get by without knowing how 'this' works, if you use CoffeeScript and change -> to => when @ doesn't work the way you thought it would the first time :)

Re: Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco

#180

Post by mcintyre1994 »

yetanotherphd wrote: post #144
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #86

I know it's a bit off-topic, but I'm a student so anything about interviews interests me a lot. For the Bacon Number question, I'm struggling a bit to get my head around a good way to do it. My immediate idea is to derive a graph where nodes are actors and an edge between 2 actors means they've been in 1 or more films together. I believe the shortest path between them and Bacon could then be found by breadth-first se…

It is the final inner loop that is problematic. Instead, your graph should comprise movies and actors as vertices (edge = actor was in a given movie), and to get the Bacon number you just halve the distance in this graph. So you code would look like for bucket in hashtable: add node for bucket for actor in bucket: if actor not in graph, add a node for actor add an edge between actor and bucket add an edge between buc…

Ah that's awesome, really smart optimisation, thanks. I hadn't really thought of the possibility of having the two different features in the same graph but that's definitely better!
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