Last week I got an email for a telephone interview for my first full-time software engineering job. The shop uses mainly Vue.js and Laravel. I only had brief contact with Frontend programming using Angular 4 and Typescript during one of my internships before. Being overprepared that I am, this weekend, I wrote a simple static web application using Vue.js. My goal is to show my future employees (hello if you're reading this :) that I am ready to learn new languages/frameworks if need be.
Due to the timezone differences, the phone interview will be conducted in Malaysian office hours. I am currently in Germany (UTC+1), and the company that I'm applying for is based in Malaysia (UTC+8). While finding a suitable time for the interview, I realized that even though there are a lot of world clocks online that show what the current time in other timezones is, I cannot find any that offers me to enter any arbitrary time. So why not write one?
I started hacking around Friday at noon. My first commit is a design document describing what this application is about and how the user will interact with it. Here's a blog post from Julia Evans explaining why design document is a great idea, even for a small project.
After that, I dove into the documentation of Vue.js and started learning. My experience was pretty good, and the Essentials section had all that I need to know to bring my idea to life. I learn the most by using the framework directly. I ask myself questions on how to do something and then look for it in the documentation. Going through the docs all at once is okay, too, because we got to have an overview of what tools are available, but sometimes some concepts are a bit vague, and we cannot discern the differences unless it is put into practice.
Not all the things that I planned to do end up in the final product, but that's just how it is. You can go to https://pokgak.gitlab.io/whatistheirtime to check it out.
I hosted the application on Gitlab Pages (free hosting!) instead of Github because I had used Gitlab CI before and liked it. The idea of having an integrated platform for doing CI/CD and the whole DevOps lifecycle seems cool too. I know Github also has Actions now, but I haven't got to it yet.
I'm satisfied with the project as a weekend hack session. I got to learn a lot and brushed up on my HTML, Javascript skills and taught me some CSS. Aside from knowing what the abbreviation means and what it does, I knew nothing about CSS, so my application only has minimal styling for now. I plan to upgrade it further when I have the time in the future.
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