Review of Educative.io’s Web Development Interview Handbook
By: Double Pointer
Tags: Technology, Interview, Coding Interviews, Frontend, Front End Development

Web Development Interview Handbook

Recently, we had an opportunity to review Educative’s new course “Web Development Interview Handbook”, a new addition to Educative’s Interview prep courses war-chest. Read-on for our $0.02.

Web development jobs are the easiest to crack in the computer science industry. If you don’t want to work on the backend systems which require knowledge of concurrency and distributed systems, you can always opt to develop frontend instead. Besides reduced complexity, web development offers greater opportunities to showcase one’s creativity and artistic abilities. Folks, who revel in seeing their work have a direct impact on the end-user may find a hard pull to work in the frontend domain.

The feedback loop when working in the frontend domain is very tight. WYSIWYG— What you see is what you get. Say, if you are a developer at Facebook and you are working on the user’s feed feature, you’ll be able to see the changes as soon as they get deployed to production. Users will be able to interact with the UI changes and leave you feedback the minute the feature is released. If you take satisfaction in delighting end-users of your product, frontend maybe your cup of tea. This tight feedback look is usually absent when working on backend systems. Say, if you are creating a reverse index e.g. using Solr to speed-up data retrieval queries for internal teams, it’ll be sometime before you see adoption, mass usage and then feedback.

At times, frontend work impacts millions of users instantly. The color and positioning of the play button on the Netflix movie player affects all Netflix users but customer-metrics collected and collated by a data team at Netflix has the executives as its primary consumers. A lot of complexity in backend systems results from multi-threading and distributed systems, all of which doesn’t afflict web development. Javascript, the staple frontend language is single threaded and modern browsers greatly aid in debugging scripts, CSS, latency issues etc.

It may seem that backend jobs are generally harder to perform versus frontend jobs and consequently the former should command a higher salary than the latter. In our professional experience that is indeed the case. frontend devs are paid a tad bit lower than their backend peers when keeping all other factors such as proficiency, years of experience, career trajectory, etc. constant. In fact, you’ll see a lot of companies willing to outsource frontend development to cheaper labor outside the US while keeping the backend core to themselves. However, this doesn’t imply that frontend devs are not well-paid. Quite the contrary, competent frontend devs are worth their weight in gold. Expertise in areas such as browser optimization, APIs, MVC pattern, CDNs, page load-time optimization, XSS attacks, CORS (cross origin resource sharing), HTTP headers, SSL, mTLS, etc is hard to come by among candidates and highly sought after by employers. Educative’s Web Development Interview Handbook course covers most of such topics.

Educative’s new course is a God-send for advanced web development roles which includes content beyond run-of-the mill questions on DOM manipulation and CSS tricks. Though if you are a seasoned web developer then this course may not deliver a lot of value other than refreshing rusty concepts. But for folks, who have nascent careers or who don’t have degrees in computer science, can find the course useful in getting hired for their next gig. The course does have its shortcomings, for instance, it doesn’t cover CSS or any of its derivatives LESS and SASS. JQuery and other popular frontend dev libraries and frameworks (React, Angular etc.) are also not covered. In the same vein, the course skips Spring and NodeJS which do have frontend components and ubiquitous throughout the industry. Note that, sometimes web development is misconstrued to mean full-stack development, which includes server side coding, that can cross boundaries into more advanced languages such as Java or C#. Full stack developers write HTML, CSS, Javascript but also dabble in server side Java, C#, and C code. Educative’s course is restricted to purely the frontend and doesn’t talk much about the server side of things other than comparing server-side vs client-side page rendering.

It’s unlikely that you’ll only be tested for web development knowledge when interviewing at a major tech firm such as Facebook, Google et, al. In fact, you’ll be asked algorithm based questions especially if you are interviewing for a full stack role. These questions test your ability to perform mental-gymnastics with data-structures such as rotating an array, inverting a binary tree, finding the shortest path etc. We’d recommend checking out the following Educative courses in case you are planning to interview for a full-time job at a serious software company.

Educative’s course is one of the options you can chose from when preparing for interviews out of a crowded marketplace for interview prep course, however, with Educative’s all-you-can-eat buffet-style subscription model you can get access to all courses for interview prep for a month for a fraction of the individual cost. As always, we highly recommend practicing on LeetCode if you have the luxury to prepare for several months. Goodluck.

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