Win the Frontend Technical Interview: Data Fetching, GraphQL, REST, SSR

The most-popular frontend interview questions always have to do with data fetching. Here’s everything you need to know about GraphQL vs. REST, data fetching libraries, and server-side rendering to win your next frontend technical interview!

This is what it feels like to win a frontend technical interview. Photo by Oliver Kallion on Unsplash

For frontend engineers, the most common technical interview question for a live-coding test is going to be something along the lines of “fetch some data from an API and render it to the user.”

(The second most common live-coding challenge is “use `setTimeout` to make a clock,” but that’s not a real world example — rarely need to make a clock in paid frontend work, outside of sometimes “polling” a data source.)

So, to help you win your next frontend technical interview, we’re going to get into the weeds to talk about data fetching best practices:

• We’ll cover the basics of why need to use JavaScript to fetch data on the client before moving on to some specifics related to Next.js (React web).
• We’ll move on to a detailed comparison of GraphQL vs. REST APIs — and why you should include GraphQL in your portfolio proejcts if that’s a…