From Front-End to Back-End
A mock interview was all that stood between me and progressing to the back-end…
To progress from the Front-End portion of Thinkful’s curriculum, you must pass your Front-End Capstone, followed by a mock interview.
I must say, I was quite nervous for this mock interview, because I barely passed my first one.
There were several questions, followed by a live coding session. Below are all of the points being graded on:
Tell me about a time when you had to juggle competing priorities and how you handled that.
How do you budget your time on a project to ensure you meet your deadlines?
Tell me about a time when you didn’t have the skills that you needed to succeed at a task, and how you handled that.
We use Git for collaboration on our teams here. What can you tell me about your experience with Git? What projects have you used Git with, and how did it help you?
Describe your workflow when creating a new web page.
We’re in the process of revising our site to make it accessible for visually-impaired users. If you were given one of our live web-pages and source code, how would you check that it’s accessible?
Can you give me an example of some of the user flows you planned for your most recent project?
What tools and techniques have you used when debugging JavaScript.
Here’s one of our public GitHub repos. Share your screen, and fork the repo. From the command line, add a README.md file that says, “Hello World”. Push your changes to GitHub, and make a PR to the public repo.
Let’s look at your project. Walk me through which API you used and how you’re getting data from it.
This app doesn’t follow a11y best practices, and the JS file is incomplete.
- Complete the getDataFromApi and displaySearchData functions.
- When you’re done, this app should allow a user to search for a specific dog breed, and display a random image of that dog breed.
- You should make requests to this API: https://dog.ceo/dog-api/ .
- Also make any necessary adjustments to make this app accessible.https://repl.it/@thinkful/dog-API-eval-question
Rate the student’s enthusiasm and passion for web development during the interview.
Rate the student’s confidence and composure during the interview.
Please include any additional feedback or comments for this student.
Great work! Dont over-engineer code challenges and don’t assume certain technical issues, read the code — then just get them working first, then if you have extra time, add in some “nice to haves” — but good job — passed — congrats!
All-in-all, I scored 34 of 36 possible stars. I think the total points are 40, but we don’t see all of them in the feedback, as they’re basically pass or fail.
I feel great about the outcome of this interview, and I’m excited to continue on into back-end.
I’m also reaching out to local professionals to talk to them about their experiences. If you’re in the Seattle area and want to chat, let me know! You can leave a comment here or catch me on linkedin.
