DEV Community: Sterling Perry

I Bombed My Technical Interview with " "

Sterling Perry — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 08:05:20 +0000

May I take a moment to vent about how coding challenges in no-way are indicative of your ability to create great apps or your worth as a developer. I'm writing my story to help any devs here that are currently trying to land a job and also to support you by saying "you're good enough!"

Big long sigh...

Just a bit of context

I've been making websites and web apps using WordPress for about 10 years and a couple years ago I completed a coding bootcamp mainly focused on the MERN stack (which I love:) The past 3 years I've had a job as a state government web developer/project manager. A couple months ago I also passed the AWS Certified Developer Exam on my first attempt. Finally last month my small band of developers and I deployed a state-wide full stack python app totally delivered on AWS.

I really like my job and the people I work with but have pretty much gone as far as I can go with advancing my career due to the very flat org chart here. The next level up is CTO! (which I served as Interim CTO when my boss got canned.)

Decision Time

I decided to shop the market for new jobs focused on my skillset, passion and work experience. I found the world needs you and I more than ever! Which is a very good thing!

A recruiter hit me up on Linkedin and told me about a SDE role at a great company I have interest in working for. She tells me how I'm underpaid at my current job and how this company would love to have someone with my background on their team. Sounds great right!? So I jumped at it and we scheduled the tech interview and I took a week off work to crack the coding interview.

Prep Time

Maybe it's me being naive; but I've been on several coding interviews and when I hear: "2 questions, 1 hour" that tells me these will be moderately-difficult questions. I'm preparing for: memoized fibonacci series, recursive array chunking, palindrome arrays, pyramids, anagrams, maxChars, steps and even brushed up on data structures and runtime complexity theory for possible questions on refactoring. I'm confident in my ability to solve these and similar problems using CoderPad.

Interview Time

For my interview I'm paired with one of their senior SDE's which is great and we start the CoderPad session. What happens next made me cringe...

I'm asked my preferred language and I reply "JavaScript please" He replies great! Here's your first question...

The infamous MagicFunction code challenge

I take a big gulp and start to work my way the best I can through the question and type out ideas for a possible algorithm to solve this beast. My interviewer isn't a totally sadistic as he tries to help me solve the problem but we end up leaving it unsolved and move on to the the next problem and tells me "not many people are able to solve this question during the interview".

My next question wasn't that much better: "Create a program that can take in any number of arguments and returns a sentence that contains an integer 1 - 9 in order on each word at position [1]. A function call would result in 't1e h2use i3 o4 t5e r6ght'..." My immediate thought while trying to type my possible algorithm is "why would I make a program to do this?" Shouldn't I be trying to strip the digits from the string?? and lastly what kinda of JS sorcery would I need to invoke to solve this problem. Needless to say I didn't solve this problem either.

These are not real world problems that we as Devs solve. When would we ever have a valid use case where we'd say: "this needs a magic function". I can vaguely see a business use case for creating data that contains chars and integers in specific positions but still not a real world application in today's marketplace.

Wrapping up the interview

After this I ask my interviewer "tell me about yesterday?" so I could get a feel for the types of problems he solves or features he's working on. My interviewer tells me that he's working on a partial payment order feature for a create-react app!!! I've done partial payments before on a couple e-commerce websites in the past and could have provided some logical pointers. I go on to show examples of my work, projects in production and the details behind them.

I hope some good companies read this post and stop asking interviewees to solve random problems that have no IRL business relevance. Sure coding challenges display your depth of programming knowledge and ninja skills but what do you gain by hiring a dev that can solve arbitrary code challenges and no IRL challenges?

Needless to say I got a rejection email the next day. This didn't destroy my confidence and I'm alive and coding today. I did fight "imposter syndrome" for a couple hours afterwards; but that's to be expected after a train wreck interview.

I'll keep trying to reach my goal as a well-paid SDE at a prominent company and won't stop until I do! If you ever find yourself bombing a coding interview just remember that you are "good enough" and you're already making some pretty cool apps. Don't sweat it and live to code another day. Best of luck on your next interview, I'm rooting for you!!

What is Headless WordPress

Sterling Perry — Fri, 16 Nov 2018 02:15:56 +0000

When first learning website development I was introduced to WordPress and was intrigued by the simplicity of creating highly functional websites that look great in a matter of hours. Now most of us here on Dev won't consider WordPress development as true "website Development." But I'm here to say that you can use WordPress in all kinds of new ways.

Headless WordPress

Headless WordPress is a way you can use the back-end database
of WordPress without the client end or front facing WordPress. Site editors will still use the WordPress editor and Dashboard to create pages, posts, etc.

REST API

connect via WordPress REST API for external outputs. Headless WordPress gives you the power of a CMS without all the additional scripts, files. This allows you to make lightweight, high performance pages.

Headless WordPress allows us developers to use newer technology such as React, Angular or Vue for the front end. The REST API will allow WordPress to send and receive JSON objects via a unique REST API URL.

The Down Side

One of the disadvantages of using headless WordPress is that plugins that do something on the front end such as Gravity Forms or WooCommerce won't work as usual. So you'll need another way to use these on the front-end of the site.

Headless WordPress is a viable option going forward to build future-proof your application with the ability to use newer tech. Also the benefits of the increase speed, quality and performance of the site make headless WordPress a definite win for more complex UI/UX.

Bootstrap Vs. CSS Grid

Sterling Perry — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 21:28:05 +0000

If you ask any front-end developer which is better, Bootstrap or CSS Grid; the answer you'll receive is "it depends." I'd like to give some unbiased context to the debate. I learned CSS Grid and Bootstrap 4 at roughly the same time and have project using both frameworks.

Bootstrap requires more html & less css

Bootstrap is div & class heavy. Meaning to render a header, aside, main-content and footer to the page; requires about 9

and depending how you want these positioned and styled could require 12-15 pre-built classes plus your own classes & Id's. Leaving the only benefit here to be writing less css.

CSS Grid will use your semantic html which in this example would be 5

but you would have to write extra CSS for each html elelment to position and style our blocks.

Responsiveness

Bootstrap includes five predefined classess for building responsive layout which sounds great but gets complex as your breakpoints are determined via html. This means you'll be adding more and more div classes to make your layout for various screen sizes.

With CSS Grid there is no need to change the HTML. You will only need to add a few different media queries to your stylesheet and define the grid layout for each semantic element of your HTML.

Custom grid layout

Well with Bootstrap you're pretty much limited to 12 columns which may or may not work for you depending on the design spec you're working from. There's also a default 10px padding on right and left which have to overridden. That gets annoying having to do this on every new project.

Using CSS Grid you have full control of the layout. Make a many columns as you want!

Page Load

Although the Bootstrap stylesheet and supporting libraries are only a few kb, they still need to be downloaded which will bloat page load. About 85% of browsers support CSS Grid so there's no need to download additional stylesheets or scripts.

Conclusion

There are merits and demerits on both sides and I call this battle a draw. Using Bootstrap means writing more HTML while CSS Grid means writing more CSS. Your preference there. Depending on the design spec, Bootstrap may not be an option. For less complex layouts, Bootstrap is a no brainer to up and going fairly quickly. Bare in mind that Bootstrap is more than a grid system; it's a complete front end toolkit which includes modals, tooltips, popovers, progress bars, etc. all predefined in classes. Using CSS grid will require writing JS/jquery files to achieve the same.

In a perfect world we'd have a package that includes the merits of both. I welcome your comments on your experiences with Bootstrap and CSS grid. What's your take on this?