Cracking the (Frontend) Coding Interview

Cracking the (Frontend) Coding Interview

5 years ago
Anonymous $roN-uuAfLt

https://blog.usejournal.com/cracking-the-frontend-coding-interview-ec7d5b1e6755

For the past couple of months I have been interviewing for frontend engineering roles in the Bay Area. As anyone who has experienced this process knows, the interview questions can feel arbitrary and the amount of knowledge we are expected to have at hand is vast. Questions can range from data structures/algorithms (DS/A from now on) to CSS trivia. When preparing for an upcoming interview, it feels like we’re being asked to commit all of MDN to memory. Add to this the fact that most interview prep materials are focused on CS fundamentals and the frontend engineering interview can seem hopelessly daunting.

In what will be a series of posts, I am going to outline my approach to preparing for frontend interviews. The underlying idea has been to take a DS/A question and transpose it into a question involving the DOM. Because the DOM is a tree, it maps very naturally to certain data structures: graphs (the superclass of trees), linked lists (a subclass of trees — specifically a unary tree), and trees themselves. With a little creativity, any question can be turned into a frontend question.