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I will refuse live coding interviews from now on.

Prelude, articles:

Against them https://dev.to/meseta/live-coding-interviews-essential-or-discriminatory-11kd

**For them **https://www.codewithjason.com/live-coding-interviews/

I have social anxiety I usually make that clear; but you wouldn't know it. I go out and I'm really great with people. I used to waiter and bartend and excel at that.

For me it's debilitating in certain scenarios like unknowns or being watched and evaluated. Once I'm comfortable with a place or people it fades; I love pairing and mentoring. I even makeself give public talks at my previous meetup fullsack_js. When I'm in a safe space the code and conversation will fly from me.

Most recently I accepted a live coding interview because "it's less about the code and more how we work together".... yeah not the case. At this point I've researched and invested my time for 2 previous interviews; a common pattern.

So my brain freezes a bit, I don't catch every optimization and I run out time before say adding tests. But I gel well with the developers testing me we figure out some issues and I display the right attitude of accepting advice and listening to my peers something I didn't do well as a junior. I'm open I'm raw which I value when hiring someone, it's more about someone's Attitude than their Aptitude in my eyes.

So I realise there was a lot of optimisations and practises to iterate on, I got bored waiting for feedback and spent two hours with a clean less stressed mind and implemented them. I mean I went above and beyond. Added PWA support on the fly image format optimisation (AVIF), keyboard monitoring (ESC to go back), cleaned up and reused functions as composables / utils, Prisma schema and auto Zod types generated, even in this case very custom validations against ISBNs which failed with their sample data... cough cough amature hour so I found real ones etc...

heres the code if you want a peak https://github.com/gregpalaci/nuxt-demo-books

and a preview https://lambent-fenglisu-27a5c4.netlify.app/

I'm 100% not mad I don't really get mad I'm disappointed they were short sighted. but wish them all the best luck finding that developer they want probably less EQ and more IQ.

This was a learning experience and I advise all developers set your boundaries and if the company isn't flexible to accommodate your safe space, don't bother

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jswhisperer profile image
Greg, The JavaScript Whisperer

I mean 100% performance for a live coding exercise, DO YOU EVEN SCALE BRO?
Image description accessibility need some love tho.

oh and obviously I wrote custome to prerender a dynamic api and prefetch all the remote images and assets.