Last December, I received an email from their recruiter asking if I was interested in Canva. I was glad to give it a try.

The first round was the coding interview. To be honest, I didn't do very well, but I could think of a better solution—an Interval Tree—though I couldn't remember too many details. After the interview, I realized I had just implemented an Interval Tree based on a Red-Black Tree 1.5 years ago. Anyway, I still had the chance to move on to the following interviews: three technical interviews and one management interview.

I had these interviews last month. Overall, I loved these technical interviews as they were very practical. I messed up in one of the coding interviews. Other feedback was all good. Particularly, I made a very, very stupid mistake. Basically, I had to implement something with the native DOM event. I just needed to get the input value when the event was triggered, but I was using KeyDown instead of KeyUp. So, I couldn't get the value correctly. I noticed the problem and thought of a workaround: using a timer. The interviewer was not satisfied with it. He reminded me of using another event. I tried KeyPress but didn't try KeyUp as, at the time, I thought I was using the correct one. I wasted a lot of time on that and felt the reminder from him was not helping at all but made me more nervous.

When I have more time to reflect on that interview, I think I should have noticed that stupid mistake very quickly because I understand what happened. Maybe sometimes I lack a bit of luck. That day, I had a headache and took some painkillers caused by Covid-19 before the interview. My mind went blank under pressure.

I received instant feedback after the interview.

By the way, I had an unsuccessful interview with Canva four years ago. This time, the interviews were not that challenging as I was not asked to implement Virtual DOM.