6 Tips and Tricks for Your Front-End Software Engineer Job Interview

If you are interviewing for a front-end software engineer job, you will likely be asked to complete an assignment as part of the job interview process. It can be tempting to kill two birds with one stone and try learning or practicing some new technology while applying for a job. However, this typically isn’t how you’ll produce your best code as a programmer. It’s better to stick to what you know best. Save learning new things for a different time.

These are the six best tips and tricks for your front-end software engineer assignment.

1. Make your front-end software engineer project easy to review.

Your deliverable should be easy for the job interviewer or hiring manager to review. The perfect flow from the reviewer’s perspective is often getting a working link, being able to see with their own eyes that the application works as expected, and easily diving into the code to see how you completed your work.

2. Deliver an interactive project.

If you’re a front-end software engineer, you should deploy your project on GitHub, GitLab or Netlify.

Never send ZIP files, as they can be inconvenient. Additionally, some companies prevent employees from downloading or opening ZIP files onto their computers because they are a security risk.

3. Add a README file.

All of your projects should have a README file, and your front-end software engineer assignment is no exception.

Introduce the exercise you implemented and link to a usable application. You can then add some high-level documentation, including which framework you used and how to build or test your code.

Share your process with the job interviewer. Reference the patterns and best practices you used explicitly in the documentation. If you had to make some trade-offs, describe and explain what you chose to do and how you implemented the trade-off.

4. Set up unit tests.

Make sure your project is functional and that it works on a range of browsers and devices. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it should be usable—no matter whether the reviewers are sitting in front of their computers or on thier phones.

Setting up unit tests can be a good way to show that you are a quality-focused developer. You don’t have to aim for full code test coverage: just have a few tests showing you know how to test.

5. Lint or set up Prettier.

Many front-end software engineers use linters and automated tools, such as ESLint or Prettier. It can be a nice touch if you do the same for your project. It will likely get noticed by your job interviewer.

6. Make meaningful commits.

Most software engineers collaborate using Git, especially for version control. Good commit messages are essential for collaborative work. Create a history that makes sense for the example project so that your job interviewer and future team members can see what your contributions would look like if you were on the team.

This article was written by Marcin Wosinek for HackerNoon and was lightly edited and published with permission.