Yeah, interviewing for front end engineers is really tricky. I mostly ask for code walkthrough of portfolio projects, but most don't have the complexity of real world projects.
And you're right, there's a lot of async logic going on on the UI for complex apps. In my experience, that's hard to grapple for a lot of programmers, frontend and backend. And before modern frameworks like React, Vue, making sure the the UI properly handles update events being dispatched from multiple sources, resolving race conditions, and updating the view correctly is difficult, it was hard not to end up with spaghetti code. It's a good thing I learnt to do a bit of video game programming in a side project, and took some of lessons learned there and applied it to front-end engineering on the web. Video games UIs are super sophisticated, but proper modelling of object and events can go a long way in to keeping things sane and maintainable. At least now we have modern frameworks to help.
People who say frontend is easy are usually thinking it's just HTML but that's not true. There's security, storage, cache management, performance, user experience and much more to deal with.
People who say frontend is easy are usually thinking it's just HTML but that's not true. There's security, storage, cache management, performance, user experience and much more to deal with.
That is true, but at least 95% of all web applications do not need this. I’ve worked on a couple that had really complex React front ends that absolutely did not require them. It just resulted in hard to maintain code, all because management wanted to use a hip framework.
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Yeah, interviewing for front end engineers is really tricky. I mostly ask for code walkthrough of portfolio projects, but most don't have the complexity of real world projects.
And you're right, there's a lot of async logic going on on the UI for complex apps. In my experience, that's hard to grapple for a lot of programmers, frontend and backend. And before modern frameworks like React, Vue, making sure the the UI properly handles update events being dispatched from multiple sources, resolving race conditions, and updating the view correctly is difficult, it was hard not to end up with spaghetti code. It's a good thing I learnt to do a bit of video game programming in a side project, and took some of lessons learned there and applied it to front-end engineering on the web. Video games UIs are super sophisticated, but proper modelling of object and events can go a long way in to keeping things sane and maintainable. At least now we have modern frameworks to help.
People who say frontend is easy are usually thinking it's just HTML but that's not true. There's security, storage, cache management, performance, user experience and much more to deal with.
That is true, but at least 95% of all web applications do not need this. I’ve worked on a couple that had really complex React front ends that absolutely did not require them. It just resulted in hard to maintain code, all because management wanted to use a hip framework.