DEV Community: Alexa Tuskey

Demystifying the Frontend Technical Interview

Alexa Tuskey — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 14:12:26 +0000

I’m going to state the obvious here: technical interviews are hard. It’s an unnatural thing, having a near-stranger (or several) watch as you face off with a problem you may or may not have encountered before, in an unfamiliar environment, with a time limit. For the majority of us, we are used to doing most of our work alone, in the comfort of our own setup, free from judging eyes and time constraints (outside of deadlines, of course). So how is one supposed to ace something that seems designed to make you fail?

Disclaimer: I’m not claiming to know how every technical interview is handled. Different companies have different processes, so do your homework beforehand via Glassdoor, or better yet, networking with people who currently work there. I wanted to write this article because I’ve seen so many talented developers let nerves/imposter syndrome/stress freeze them up when I know they know what they’re doing. I hope this perspective from other side will give you a confidence boost to let your hard work and talent shine.

You don’t need to finish.

I want to see how you work. I could care less how quickly you do it. You aren’t going to be working like this if we hire you, so why would I expect you to hackertype like your life depended on it? Take a deep breath, and take your time. If you want talk through what you’re doing and use me as your rubber duck, great. If you’d prefer to concentrate in silence, no problem. I want to see how you approach the problem, if you write pseudocode, what methods you try and if something doesn’t work as expected, how you get around it. I’ve seen really good developers get choked up and freeze because they’re watching the clock. While it’s much easier said than done to relax, just know that speed does not necessarily equate understanding in my eyes, so take your time.

It’s okay to ask to look something up.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, that good developers are good Googlers. It’s true! The more experience you get as a developer, the better questions you know to ask. Plus, we are expected to know a lot of information! Different languages, different syntaxes, different tools. Why would I expect you to memorize everything you’ve ever learned if I use search engines daily in my own workflow? If you need a refresher on the syntax of the Fetch API, don’t be afraid to ask to look it up really quick. I can see the difference between someone who understands what they’re doing, and someone who is just trying to look up answers to quickly copy and paste.

Be careful with frameworks/libraries.

Unless you are very comfortable using a framework or a library in a sandbox environment, skip it for Vanilla JS/plain CSS. You may be used to working with one in a pre-setup environment, whether it was set up by someone else or by a meta-framework like Nuxt, but trying to set one up in a sandbox while you’re against the clock can lead to stress and disaster. Depending on the seniority of the role, if you don’t have much experience with frameworks but are strong with Vanilla and plain CSS, that’s going to look a lot better than fumbling with the set up and syntax of a framework.

Be open to advice.

If I see you getting stuck and the right questions just aren’t coming, I’ll try my best to drop some helpful tidbits to point you in the right direction because I want you to succeed. Not everyone likes taking advice though, especially if it isn’t their preferred way of doing things. You are free to solve your problem however you want, but if you don’t even consider a different way (without explaining why), I might question how you’ll work within our team and with other developers.

One more little secret: I get nervous interviewing people too. Am I coming off as welcoming and friendly? Do I sound like I know what I’m doing? Will I know the answer if I’m asked a question? Remember: you are interviewing your interviewer too (as weird as that sounds). Would you like working with/for this person? Does the team you will be working with seem supportive and inclusive? Does the challenge you are being given seem fair to the role and skill level that you are interviewing for? Practicing these questions internally beforehand helps humanize your interviewer and generally makes the process a little less scary. Remember, a good company/interviewer/human should be rooting for you too.

Dear New Front-End Developer

Alexa Tuskey — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 15:49:46 +0000

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been a front-end developer for three years now! Sometimes I have to pinch myself because I can’t believe it’s my JOB to build cool things and solve puzzles all day. It isn’t always sunshine and rainbows, but after three years I’ve finally built the confidence to accept any challenge that comes my way with minimal fear and self-doubt (but some days are tougher than others!).

Someone I’m close to recently told me that they are making a career switch to development from a very different field, and helping him work through concepts that I remember learning not so long ago has me looking at them from a new perspective. In the spirit of helping him and celebrating my anniversary, I decided to come up with a list of things that I wish I had known when I first started:

If you’re a bootcamp grad, don’t rely SOLELY on Javascript frameworks.

My bootcamp jumped into jQuery pretty quickly, and shortly after I graduated I had to jump into my new role at work using Vue. The learning curve for Vue was super easy, and I was quickly able to adapt working on basic projects. But as my career advanced and I began working on older maintenance projects that were built without Vue, I realized that I had been using it as a shorthand crutch and that I really didn’t know many basic vanilla JS concepts. I see this a lot with new bootcamp grads who are forced quickly into React, Vue, and Angular. While these tools are awesome and quickly help you scale applications, if you don’t have fundamental understanding of Javascript you’ll drown the moment you’re out of your comfort zone. I had to work backwards and relearn a lot of the fundamentals that I had skipped over, which was tough. The lesson here: make sure you TRULY understand what you’re writing, framework or not. If your bootcamp doesn’t go into vanilla, practice on your own with sites like FreeCodeCamp and ask lots of questions.

Learn early how to use the browser console.

In my first year, I suffered through hours of frustrating console errors that made no sense to me, and wasted time writing throwaway code in my IDE that I had no idea if it was actually helping or hurting. Once I learned how to do basic DOM queries and write functions to test my work directly in the console, I learned so much more about how the DOM worked and it saved me precious time debugging. My friend thinks these basic steps are boring and questions their usefulness, but I’m assuring him that becoming fluent now will save him a lot of headaches.

Break stuff. Seriously.

You will break things. Probably a lot of things. This is okay! Learning how to fix broken things gives you power. You are way more likely to understand how something works if you have the visceral memory of how you broke it in the first place and the steps you used to fix it. I love forking things in Codepen and commenting out random parts of the code piece by piece to see how it breaks to figure out how it actually works - this is how I learned the ins and outs of SVGs. It’s better to try and fail and learn from your mistakes than to not try at all and learn nothing.

Find a mentor.

You don’t have to struggle alone. I was so afraid to ask for help in my first year, that I often spent hours going in circles or sitting stuck because I just couldn’t get through something. As the only female front-end developer on my team, I felt insecure asking for help because I didn’t want to look weaker than my male colleagues. My good friend Ryan took me under his wing and I learned extremely good habits and problem-solving skills from him, and he never tired of answering my questions (at least outwardly!). Don’t be afraid to ask someone to help you, and to ask for someone who inspires you to mentor you! I love helping out new developers because I empathize with the struggle of learning so much new stuff so quickly and how hard it can be, and I know other seasoned developers feel the same.

Make time for an analog hobby.

Many of my dev friends stay up into the late hours coding pet projects, which is awesome. I am not one of those people. I love to code, but staring at a screen all day is draining for me in particular, and I find that investing in analog hobbies helps me feel fulfilled, well-rounded, and leaves me feeling fresh and excited to code the next day. Knitting is one of my favorite analog hobbies. I love to create things (obviously) and doing something productive and methodical that doesn’t take a lot of brainpower (except when I’m knitting lace…yikes!) gives me a peaceful, meditative end to my day. I also love to run, cook, and do yoga. In balancing these types of self-care activities with my work, I find that I have a good shield against burnout, even when things get hectic at the office.

In your first few years, it can feel like you will NEVER catch up to your knowledgable peers. It’s scary and hard and intimidating. But you WILL get there. The more you practice and dedicate yourself, the more coding will begin to feel like muscle memory. You’ll surprised yourself with the things you begin to remember, and as you form good habits you’ll solve problems more quickly. Stick with it, dear newbie, and believe in yourself.

How Learning to Code Taught Me How to Run (And Vice Versa)

Alexa Tuskey — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 20:51:19 +0000

Two years ago today, I walked into my first class of my Front-End Web Development course. Shortly after that, I laced up my bargain Skechers and went out for my first run as part of a couch to 5K program.

These two things don’t sound like they could be any more different, and my motivations for both were different at first, too. But two years later I can say that they’ve both taught me more valuable lessons than I’d ever thought possible.

I wanted to learn how to code because it was a culmination of a life-long fascination with technology that I had always thought I wasn’t “good enough” or “smart enough” to handle. I loved hacking together custom Myspace layouts as a teenager, so I took a Java class my senior year of high school to see what it was all about. I was the only girl in the class, and it was the only coding class my high school offered. I flew through the lessons and labored over adding little features to every project. I was hooked. But when I got accepted into college and began to decide on a major, I saw Calculus in the first semester requirements and panicked. “I’m TERRIBLE at math”, I told myself. I could never handle the classes. Better to just stay in my lane with what I thought I could handle, which happened to be graphic design.

Growing up, I was an awkward kid. My hand-eye coordination was non-existent, and I was always picked last in gym class. When we had to run the mile, I would cry through the entire thing as I lagged behind all the other kids. As I fumbled into adulthood, my relationship with exercise was predictably terrible and relegated to the occasional recreational game of volleyball with friends. When I hit 26, I was embarrassed when I heard my coworkers talking about the long runs they were doing on the weekends and I couldn’t remember the last time I had run outside of gym class. My coworker asked me to do a 5K and I reluctantly agreed. “But I’ll never be an athlete,” I told myself. I’ll just do a Couch to 5K program, just to say I did it, and maybe lose a couple of pounds along the way.

Why did I decide to embark on both of these journeys at once? Who knows, probably nagging thoughts from a post-quarter-life crisis. While only one journey had its heart in the right place (coding), there was a lot of fear surrounding both (can I really do this?). Summer came that year, and with it came my first finish line and my first development projects at work. And with both of those milestones came two realizations: I actually made it! And, I have SO much to learn!

My love of coding never faltered, but my love of running began to creep up ever so slowly until the following spring, when I realized how much I had come to love both of these things that once scared me. And that with time, dedication, and thousands of hours of practice, I COULD handle both running and coding, lack of hand-eye coordination and mathematical skills aside.

The journey was never easy. I suffered my first running injuries this past winter. I have flat feet, and for some reason, it didn’t catch up with me until a year and a half into running, but when it did, my knees failed catastrophically. If there was a silver lining, my injuries developed in the off-season as I trained through Chicago’s brutal winter, but both injuries required time off running, which was unfathomable to me. Running had become part of my identity, and being unable to do what I loved so much was devastating.

As my two-year developer anniversary grew closer, I began to reflect on what my coding journey has been like, and I realized that it was surprisingly similar to my running journey, and even more so during my injuries. I recalled the many times in the past two years that I became “stuck”, and unable to move forward on a project due to a seemingly insurmountable bug. In my first year, I would silently panic until I was able to get a senior dev to help me, but in the past year, I learned to slow way down and walk through the problem step by step until I found the solution. Do I still need help from other devs from time to time? Absolutely, and I love soaking up their wisdom. But I’ve become so much more self-reliant, because I believe in myself and I KNOW I can handle the problem, one step at a time.

As I reflected on that, sidelined by my bad knees, I realized that pushing through the injury was as useless as trying to hack my way through a bug. I needed to slow way down and take it step by step, ask “senior” runners for wisdom, and believe that I could handle my injury. I’m two weeks into my recovery plan now, adding 5 more minutes of running every other day (as long as it’s pain free), and I’m hoping to be able to run the Shamrock Shuffle at the end of the month. One step at a time.

As a developer, should you be a runner too? Maybe, but that’s totally up to you. What I do know is that coding opens up so much more than you realize, and teaches lessons of self-reliance that are hard to find elsewhere. Find joy in the journey, and you’ll be surprised by what you can handle along the way.

Nevertheless, Alexa Tuskey Coded

Alexa Tuskey — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 03:02:08 +0000

I began/continue to code because...

I have been fascinated by code ever since the good ol' Myspace days! When I figured out that there were patterns and sequences in the markup to my profile page that I could learn to manipulate, I was hooked. I took a Java class in high school which opened my eyes, because I learned that not only could I change the way things looked on my screen, I could tell the computer exactly what I wanted it to do within my program.

When I had to pick a major in college, I was torn between graphic design and computer science. I have always been a visual person, and the calculus and other mathematical requirements for a CompSci degree scared me, so I picked the former. While I loved learning how to design, there was always a little voice in the back of my head that said, what if?

Fast forward to four years into my professional design career. Leaving my short-lived stint in print design behind, I found my passion lay in designing websites. I work at a smaller company, and departments work closely together. I found myself jealous of the front-end developers that I began to work with. They were actually building the sites! I remembered how much I loved to tinker with code and felt the pull to start learning again. It didn't take long for my very observant and supportive manager to realize my latent love for coding and help me pursue a new path in my career; one in which I could both design AND build websites.

I recently overcame...

Many of my new skills are learned on the job from my fellow devs, the majority of whom either went to school for programming or have been doing this for many years. It's easy to pigeonhole myself into the "newb" spot, since I have only been doing front-end development for about a year now. However, I have come to realize that the "newb" spot is tricky because it can sometimes be an excuse for me. "I can't learn that, it's too hard! I just don't have enough experience to try that! There's no way I can help out on that project!"

While I certainly know I'm going to continue to struggle in my first few years, I have come to realize that the only way to progress onward and learn as much as I can is to say YES to as many of these challenges as I can, and accepting that I may fail or have to ask for help, but in the end, I will have learned something. I had a coworker ask me for help with a Flexbox bug in IE the other day, a dev with years of experience. My first instinct was to say "I'm not sure, ask one of the other front-end devs," but I swallowed my fear, thought about it, and realized I DID know the answer! I was able to help him out and felt like I was truly starting to believe in myself and my abilities.

My advice for women and non-binary folks who code is....

Believe in your abilities, believe in your strength, believe in your intelligence. It's so much easier said than done, but it makes such a difference in how quickly and confidently you learn and move forward. Remember how far you've come, and how much strength comes from knowing that. Know that asking for help makes you strong, not weak, and most senior devs enjoy helping you work through problem solving. Pay it forward with other devs who need your help, even helping to solve the smallest problem can mean everything to someone.

Hi, I'm Alexa Tuskey

Alexa Tuskey — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 03:29:10 +0000

I have been coding for < 1 year.

You can find me on Twitter as @LaserTuskey

I live in Chicago.

I work for One North Interactive.

I mostly program in these languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript.

I am currently learning more about...everything.

Nice to meet you.